CloudFlare

Background

PumpkinLady.com is a website dedicated to pumpkin carving. We have created a thriving business by offering pumpkin carving patterns to people all over the world. We have a global audience, attracting our largest audience from Europe.

Business challenge

Our website has been around for 13 years now and traffic has been steadily growing since year one. Along with growth, however, come the pains of greater bandwidth and CPU usage. Last year we had to make two server moves during the peak of our season to accommodate the increase in resource consumption. All in all we ended up with a drastic increase in server expenses just for September and October, not to mention the lost sales during the down time. In addition to the increased server costs, we also had to invest hours of manpower to move the site back to a shared hosting environment once the traffic died down.

Our business is seasonal, so that means we only have to deal with this level of traffic and resource usage for a couple of months a year. October is our busiest month, typically seeing 15 times more traffic compared to the rest of the year. This year I was determined to set up our infrastructure in a way that would prevent us from having to move from the shared hosting environment. Fortunately, I came across CloudFlare. We heard about CloudFlare through their partnership with WP Total Cache and decided to sign up in order to help offload the huge increase in traffic we were about to experience.

The green spike shows the huge jump in traffic to pumpkinlady.com the day before Halloween.

CloudFlare’s impact

In the month of October, CloudFlare saved us 1.54 terabytes—not gigabytes—terabytes! This is the equivalent to 1540 copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica. The bandwidth was enough to blow my mind, but I was floored when I saw the amount of requests that were saved. Out of 140 million requests in the past 30 days, CloudFlare saved 97% of them.

In short, CloudFlare has provided us with the resource savings that we needed to stay in a shared hosting environment. CloudFlare is truly one of the best investments we have ever made—anyone who has not taken advantage of this company’s great service is definitely missing out.