Introduction

Higgins Storm Chasing provides weather reports and alerts to a mass following on Facebook with over 1 million followers with tens of thousands of subscribers on their WordPress based site. Under the previous cPanel based host, Higgins Storm Chasing continually hit resource limits and crashed frequently.

Being online for major weather events is our biggest priority. We are issuing out alerts that are sometimes life and death and our service must remain online even with the biggest spikes in traffic.

Jeff Higgins
Higgins Storm Chasing.

The Problem

Higgins Storm Chasing frequently has sudden surges in traffic when weather alerts go out to subscribers. These surges can easily surpass 5 million requests an hour and often occur without any prior warning. Higgins Storm Chasing needed a solution that could scale quickly but also had enough base load capability to handle the initial spikes. Previous cPanel based solution would fail to meet this high level demand especially without notice.

The Solution

SequelWP Enterprise Cluster is designed exactly for this requirement. Instead of having 1 single box for the site to reside on, everything is scaled to multiple dedicated servers. These dedicated servers allow for extremely high amounts of traffic as a base load level. This is perfect as traffic to Higgins Storm Chasing is almost always without notice. Having a large cluster always on allows time for our system to detect the spike and add more servers well before they hit the capacity of the base load cluster. This has allowed Higgins Storm Chasing to grow their subscriber memberships knowing full well there site will always be online.

Conclusion

Since moving to a SequelWP Enteprise Cluster, Higgins Storm Chasing has experienced a 70% increase in traffic to their website with a 40% increase in memberships. If you need a solution like this, talk to our team at SequelWP and we can build you a custom WordPress cluster with an extremely fast turnaround.