Their main product, The Original Swagway™, has been featured on Good Morning America, Ellen, LIVE with Kelly and Michael, The Insider, The Today Show, Mashable, Wired, People, CBS This Morning, PC Magazine, and more. The hoverboard market is heating up and Swagway is on fire. So why was Cyber Monday in trouble for such a successful company? Hosting that just wasn’t cutting it.
Swagway approached us the week before Cyber Monday while using an 8-Core 16GB Digital Ocean Droplet, which they had made some minor performance tweaks to. The system administration was taking up more time, coupled with the fact that the setup was having trouble keeping up with the velocity their WooCommerce cart was pushing. With Cyber Monday fast approaching, they needed a host who could handle the kind of volume they were expecting. Just a few days prior, one of their daytime television appearances nearly took the entire operation offline.
Caleb Worm who runs technical operations for the site approached us after reading positive reviews and our performance in Kevin Ohashi’s most recent load testing analysis of managed WordPress hosts.
Buying hosting, in general, isn’t fun and is a lot like buying a car. A lot of BS and not much substance. We try to do things differently around here. In Caleb’s words:
The COO contacted me with an actual solution instead of lot of “trust us” fluff I was getting elsewhere. He was honest and straight-forward which was very refreshing.
After migration, support was handled by Kinsta’s WordPress experts and they made some excellent suggestions and tweaks which dramatically improved performance.
We put Swagway on one of our plans running HHVM paired with MariaDB, and the site not only began to load much faster, it also was able to handle an incredible amount of traffic and orders. Here are some statistics to back that up:
- 90,000 unique visitors on Cyber Monday
- 160-350 active users on the site placing orders during any given second
- 4,089 orders during between Black Friday and Cyber Monday
- 1888 orders on Cyber Monday alone
