Skip to content
Systemcraft

Scalable Digital Products

High-Traffic Campaign Platform

For the launch, sale or registration day where everyone arrives in the same ten minutes.

The problem

Your campaign will either fail quietly or succeed loudly, and only one of those takes the site down.

Campaign traffic does not behave like normal traffic

Normal traffic rises through the morning. Campaign traffic arrives in a spike: the notification goes out, and thirty thousand people open the same page in four minutes. Systems that are comfortable all year fall over in that window.

What actually breaks

  • One database query with no index, called on every page load
  • A third-party service that rate-limits you at the worst moment
  • Sessions or carts held in one server's memory, so scaling out loses them
  • Auto-scaling that starts new servers slower than the spike arrives
  • The queue that was fine at ten per minute and is not at ten per second

What we do before the date

  • Load test against a production copy, at your expected number and then double
  • Fix the first bottleneck the test finds, then test again — usually three rounds
  • Pre-warm capacity for the known start time instead of scaling reactively
  • Set alerts and a rollback plan, and agree who is watching during the window

Proof

A campaign platform we prepared went through its peak with no downtime. The measurements, and what we changed to get there, are in the campaign platform case study.

If your date is next week

Say so. There is a shorter version of this that finds the worst bottleneck and adds a queue, and there is honest advice about reducing scope. What we will not do is tell you it will be fine.

Questions we get asked

Can you guarantee no downtime?

No, and nobody honest will. What we can do is find your ceiling, raise it above your expected peak with margin, and have a tested plan for the failure modes we cannot remove. A guarantee without a load test is marketing.

Is a queue page a failure?

It is far better than an error page. A queue that tells people their position keeps the campaign alive at a fraction of the infrastructure cost. We often recommend it deliberately rather than scaling for a peak that lasts ten minutes.

Services

  • Cloud & DevOps

    Deploys that are boring, costs you can predict, and a system that stays up on your biggest day.

  • Backend Engineering

    The part nobody sees, and the part that decides whether your product survives a busy Monday.

Industries

  • SaaS & Startups

    Ship without painting yourself into a corner, and survive the day your launch works.

Case Studies

Guides