From Frequent Crashes to Flawless Flights: How Cloudways Autonomous Helped Spitfire Competitions Double Down on UX

About Spitfire Competitions

What connects the thrill of an adventurous flight with the process of winning such an experience online?

Spitfire Competitions offers a rare opportunity for people from the UK and Ireland to win a chance to fly in a WWII Spitfire for only £1 a ticket, a stark comparison to the usual cost of up to £3,000.

You can imagine the surge of history & adventure enthusiasts on their website to avail an extraordinary opportunity like this.

And while Spitfire Competitions delivered exhilarating flight experiences, they were encountering challenges with a smooth online entry process for their customers. Frequent website crashes during peak competition periods frustrated potential participants, jeopardizing the company’s mission to make this unique opportunity accessible to all.

In the following paragraphs, we won’t be able to make you experience the thrill of flying in a spitfire (unfortunately). But we’ll walk you through how Zak Sampson, Director of Spitfire Competitions, enhanced the online experience for the participants with Cloudways Autonomous.

Detours to Keep up With the Demand

Zak’s team ran competitions every month with the aim to make it easy for everyone interested to have a fair chance at winning.

However, the website encountered challenges under high traffic loads, prompting their team to take some detours to make sure it doesn’t slow or go down.

To prevent the server from becoming overwhelmed, the team manually split customer contact lists for email, SMS, and marketing campaigns into multiple files, to be sent out at different times to avoid a lot of simultaneous users to the site at once.

This process was not only inefficient but also diverted valuable resources away from more strategic tasks, such as improving the competition offerings or enhancing customer engagement strategies.

This also resulted in inefficient marketing delivery. Sending marketing campaigns in staggered batches to avoid overloading the server likely compromised engagement rates, as timing is crucial in marketing, and being unable to reach the entire audience simultaneously could have resulted in missed opportunities and decreased effectiveness of promotional efforts.

Not only this but managing multiple files and schedules also increased the complexity of operations and the likelihood of errors. Mistakes in segmentation, timing, or content could have led to customer dissatisfaction or confusion, potentially affecting the brand’s reputation.

Going Autopilot with Cloudways Autonomous

To make their web hosting strong and improve website reliability, particularly during high-traffic competition entry periods, Spitfire Competitions transitioned to Cloudways Autonomous.

Autonomous offers a hosting experience on autopilot, managing both the hosting infrastructure and the traffic a website receives by automatically scaling server resources. Zak needed a managed hosting solution that would sustain a high number of simultaneous users to the website without crashing or losing performance. And Autonomous’ built-in autoscaling and high-availability supported by underlying cutting edge technology at an accessible price point, made perfect sense for Spitfire Competitions as an SMB to employ it.

This move greatly improved both site reliability and customer experience.

“The website no longer experiences crashes or freezes, providing a smooth user experience during peak traffic periods. With the time and the extra admin saved, we hope to focus more on our strategic business goals.”

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The Way Forward for Spitfire Competitions

At Spitfire Competitions the team’s goal is to make the thrill of flying in a Spitfire accessible to as many people as possible without the high costs usually involved. They aim to grow their community of participants each month, increasing the number of entries and, by extension, the number of people who get to experience this unique adventure.

They want to double their user base within the next year by working on reaching more people across the UK and Ireland through targeted marketing campaigns and social media engagement.

After switching to Cloudways Autonomous, they’re happy that they’ll be able to focus on adding more variety of experiences related to aviation and adventure to give their users more reasons to keep coming back.