case study

How Lucky Day Competitions Halved Costs and Doubled WordPress Performance with AWS Migration & Modernisation

Sector

Online

Service

AWS Managed Services

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The Problem

The Lucky Day Competitions website sees huge demand during peak draw times, involving a 2-5x increase in traffic over the space of a few minutes while thousands of customers rush to purchase tickets at the last moments of a prize draw. Such a spiky traffic profile is an ideal candidate for auto-scaling infrastructure.

Logicata migrated and modernised the Lucky Day Competitions website infrastructure from a popular managed WordPress hosting provider to a dedicated AWS Organization with an autoscaling LAMP stack built by Logicata specifically for Lucky Day Competitions. This resulted in monthly hosting savings of over 50% and a significant increase in key performance metrics.

The Challenge

Lucky Day Competitions faced several challenges with the previous hosting solution, including:

  • Limitations in scalability, struggling to handle traffic spikes during new draw launches and winner announcements. The platform’s traffic is highly spiky, with significant surges during new competition launches and prize draws, which can increase up to 5x in the space of minutes when selling hundreds of thousands of tickets in an evening.
  • High monthly standing charges to cover the enterprise-level plan required to support the traffic spikes, even though during quiet times, such a high-end solution was not required.

To overcome these hurdles, the company identified AWS’s scalable cloud services as a potential hosting solution.

The Solution – High Performance WordPress Hosting on AWS

Logicata’s WebAssure, a high-performance WordPress hosting solution powered by AWS was selected by Lucky Day Competitions and their web agency – Drive Digital. Logicata and Drive Digital collaborated closely to ensure that the resulting platform was able to scale up automatically to manage the spiky traffic demands, then scale down again after the traffic peaks. Collaborative and extensive load testing was undertaken to validate the final build before finalising the migration. Drive Digital carried out the code migration with support from Logicata’s specialist WordPress team.

The solution included:

  • High Availability and Autoscaling Infrastructure: Designed and implemented on AWS to ensure uninterrupted performance during peak traffic periods. The infrastructure includes multiple Amazon EC2 application instances in an Auto Scaling Group behind an Application Load Balancer. The database runs on Amazon RDS configured in Multi-Availability Zone mode, which means that the database can automatically recover in the event of a failure of the primary availability zone. The Auto Scaling Group was carefully tuned to ensure it responded to peak demands fast enough to ensure customers of Lucky Day Competitions could complete ticket purchases without delay. AWS Certificate Manager is used for TLS certificates, and media is offloaded to Amazon S3 to be served directly via the CloudFront CDN.
  • WordPress-optimised application servers were built by Logicata.
  • Extensive caching was implemented to reduce response times, including object caching using Amazon ElastiCache for Redis and full-page CDN caching in Amazon CloudFront.
  • Migration Support: Logicata worked with Drive Digital to provide comprehensive support for a smooth transition to AWS, minimizing costly downtime for the Lucky Day site.
  • WordPress Plugin Troubleshooting: Logicata’s expert engineers resolved any plugin issues before and after the migration.
  • AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF): Included in all WebAssure plans, configured with rules to protect against OWASP Top 10 Web Application Vulnerabilities.

The Results

By migrating to Logicata WebAssure, Lucky Day Competitions achieved:

  • Cost Savings: Over 50% savings compared to the previous hosting provider.
  • Improved Performance: A nearly 2.5x reduction in average Time to First Byte (TTFB), from 135ms to 55ms on Logicata WebAssure (measured from various European locations using an independent speed testing service). The high-performance AWS infrastructure and autoscaling capabilities also ensured uninterrupted performance during a very large traffic spike a few days after the migration to AWS was completed.
  • Scalability: The AWS infrastructure provides unlimited capacity, flexibility, and scalability to support future growth.
  • Dedicated Support: Engineer-led support from engineers proficient in AWS infrastructure and WordPress ensures highly tailored solutions and quick issue resolution.
  • Last Migration: With WebAssure, Lucky Day Competitions owns its AWS infrastructure, ensuring this will be the last website migration needed.
  • Full Control: The dedicated AWS Organization gives Lucky Day Competitions complete control over and ownership of its website hosting infrastructure.

Conclusion

The migration and modernisation to Logicata WebAssure WordPress Hosting powered by AWS enabled Lucky Day Competitions to overcome the limitations of its previous hosting solution. By leveraging Logicata’s expertise and the power of AWS, the company achieved significant cost savings and improved performance—including a dramatic reduction in TTFB—and established a scalable infrastructure to support its growing business. This case study highlights the benefits of a tailored hosting platform that prioritises performance, scalability, and expert support.

Karl Robinson, CEO at Logicata, commented, “We are thrilled to see Lucky Day Competitions benefit from the performance and cost savings that WebAssure delivers. The nearly 2.5x reduction in TTFB is a testament to Logicata’s skills and experience with WordPress and AWS-powered infrastructure.”

Client Testimonial

Mark Starzynski, Co-Founder at Drive Digital, added, “The support from Logicata was outstanding. Their team’s expertise and responsiveness made the migration seamless, and they provided invaluable assistance throughout the process. As the original creators of the Lucky Day Competitions WordPress site, it was crucial for us to have a partner who understood our vision and could elevate the platform’s performance.”

About Logicata

At Logicata, we’re in the business of building better businesses.

Logicata makes AWS simple and scalable. So you can focus on what matters: growing your business with confidence.

Promises are kept by people, not technology. Here at Logicata, we promise to help you run your business better. We do this by deploying solutions which:

  1. Improve your customers’ experiences…
  2. Simplify life for you and your team.

So your business runs smoothly. So you can scale. At the speed you want to.

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