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Case Study

Candi

Candi helps fans connect with their favorite celebrities via video chat.

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Case Study

Candi

Candi helps fans connect with their favorite celebrities via video chat.

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How to Handle Thousands of Users on Your Site at Once: A Case Study with Candi

Founded by Keithan Hedrick and Quiante Hedrick, Meet Candi is a social network that allows fans to video chat with their favorite celebrities and influencers. Fans find their favorite celebrity on the platform, purchase a Meet & Greet, then schedule a time to meet them over Zoom.

Launched in April 2020 at the height of the pandemic, Candi was lucky enough to be featured on Shark Tank as a new venture. While preparing for this opportunity, they realized that many other companies that had gone on the show suffered huge spikes in traffic, often so much traffic that the site went down. Candi needed a hosting solution that could provide both technical support and the ability to handle large traffic spikes in demand.  

The Opportunity

The COVID-19 Pandemic and subsequent lockdowns created a huge wave of demand for online, digital entertainment. Additionally, with many film productions delayed and in-person events rescheduled, celebrities found themselves with a ton of free time. This created a huge opportunity for Candi to grow and connect fans to celebrities online.

Even as the pandemic has subsided, Candi remains a valuable and growing business, as many celebrities and influencers prefer the online work-from-home model that this business allows for. As with many other industries, remote-first is now becoming the default way of working.

As concerts and movie sets have reopened, some of the biggest A list celebrities don’t have as much availability as during the pandemic. However, there is still an overall growing demand and trend towards these kinds of one-on-one personalized interactions, especially as the entertainment industry itself adopts an online-first approach to distributing their content.

CHALLENGE

High Availability and Security During Shark Tank

Trust is the most important part of a website like Candi. It’s crucial that the website is online, secure, and loads quickly. This is especially important for building confidence with first-time buyers who may be skeptical of the platform.

Traffic amounts can vary depending on seasonal factors, celebrity events, and marketing campaigns. This is why Candi has made it a priority to always have the site online and running smoothly – and that’s where Convesio comes in.

Solution

Managed Hosting for WordPress on Convesio

Convesio’s unique technology is designed for websites that are growing quickly, making it ideal for businesses like Candi that need to handle a huge influx of traffic in a short period of time. Plus, our team of WordPress experts is available 24/7, ensuring that we can address any issues if they arise.

One of the best parts of leveraging Convesio’s hosting platform is the included enterprise software. Candi didn’t want to spend time researching plugins and security. Indeed, they couldn’t spend the time, as they were growing so quickly.  This made Convesio a good choice, as we include a wide variety of enterprise grade software in our plans. This includes AI monitoring, enterprise bandwidth management, and plugin patching, to name a few. 

On the night of Shark Tank, one of the main issues to address is your load capacity of your site.  You’d always hear these follow-ups of their site crashing.  When we got the call we were going to air, the next call I made was to find a partner that could handle the load.  Convesio was able to handle 10k users at once.  It was great to have the Convesio team at hand to help keep the site up.  I was very impressed with what your team was able to do.

Needless to say, Candi’s website handled Shark Tank well. Although we didn’t know exactly how much traffic there would be, we were prepared. Our Scale Ops team managed the infrastructure to handle the predicted spike in sudden traffic. And our team was ready to jump in and immediately handle issues if they arose.

Going forward, Candi won’t have to worry about website outages, no matter how heavy the traffic load. Everything is handled automatically. Events like Shark Tank are no problem.

Convesio Solution

Plan: Custom Enterprise
Specs: 27 vCPU, 1000 Workers, 40GB Memory, NGINX, Dedicated Percona DB Cluster (3 nodes), Redis
Main PluginsWooCommerce

RESULT

What Candi Loves About Convesio

Keithan has been particularly impressed by our support team and how accessible we are. Unlike many other hosting companies, we offer direct Slack and email support, meaning that you don’t need to navigate through a complicated ticketing system to get help. We create a specific Slack channel for all of our clients, making it super easy to contact us if you have any questions or concerns.

I find the team to be very responsive. I appreciate having someone I can call or Slack directly.

As the COVID-19 pandemic provided a rare opportunity for online businesses, the Meet Candi team was looking for a quick and effective way to build a site that wouldn’t go down. Lacking the technical expertise and desire to spend time building web infrastructure to keep their site up and running, they turned to Convesio. Our team of experts handles everything, allowing you to focus on growing your business – and not managing your WordPress site.

Quote Marks

Testimonial

We wanted something easy to use because we’re not technical founders. We wanted to make sure the site works. And with Convesio, it does.

– Keithan Hedrick, Co-Founder of Candi

Quote Marks

Testimonial

We wanted something easy to use because we’re not technical founders. We wanted to make sure the site works. And with Convesio, it does.

– Keithan Hedrick, Co-Founder of Candi

Get Started

Ready to Switch to Convesio?

As transaction oriented websites continue to grow and have unexpected spikes, it’s important to have a hosting solution that can keep up with the demand. With Convesio, you can be confident that your website will be able to handle whatever traffic comes its way, allowing you to focus on building your products and services.

Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you take your WooCommerce website to the next level.

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