ZERO TO 400 CONCURRENT

USERS IN LESS THAN 10 SECONDS.

PLATFORM.SH SUPPORTS

PHENOMENAL GROWTH

FOR START-UP!

platform.sh

INTRODUCTION

This customer migrated to Platform.sh less than 1

week after their evaluation finished and they

signed contracts, finally solving various Drupal

development process constraints and business

critical scaling problems in production.

They are fast approaching 30,000 subscribers,

and during the football season, every week 60

plus games kick-off simultaneously, instigating

500,000 notifications being issued within 10

second windows, resulting in peaks of 4-500

concurrent users throughout the 90 minute

match window.

CUSTOMER TESTIMONIAL

URL

www.bettracks.co.uk

WHAT BETTRACKS DO

www.bettracks.co.uk offers a centralised

information hub for the football punter, whilst

also catering to more generalised football fans

across the world. It provides a multi-platform live

score service across desktop, tablets and

mobiles. Users are able to personalise their

selections to track any match in any of the major

leagues world- wide, further choosing from a

multitude of options around specific aspects of

the match that they are really interested in.

Bettracks is also the only bet tracker offering

every bet type from first goal scorer to match

outcome. Users are alerted on all major events

via push notifications, which are the fastest in the

industry, with sub 2 second delays between the

ball hitting the back of the net and the subscriber

being notified. Furthermore, users are offered

live betting odds and promotions related to their

selections, for example a Manchester United fan

will be instantly alerted to an odds boost on that

match by one of the bookmakers.

“Bettracks has grown organically since launch in

2010, and is now used by tens of thousands of

football fans across the UK and Europe. In such a

dynamic and fast moving industry such as

iGaming, where the business lives or dies by its

online presence, Bettracks needed a development platform that removed the management overheads of

hosting, the complexity associated with fast Continuous Integration (CI), and the hassle of keeping staging

servers consistent with live, in other words everything that is not core to delivering a fabulous user

experience”, said Scott Hooker, Founder.

PROBLEMS PRIOR TO DISCOVERING PLATFORM.SH

Before moving to Platform.sh, Bettracks were managing themselves with a well- known global hosting vendor.

Being a fast growing business that operates around a varying patterns of huge traffic spikes based on major

sporting events, instant scaling was always going to become the critical issue. Depending on the profile of the

game, its popularity and newsworthiness, spontaneous interest denoted by ‘user tracking’ was difficult to

predict, and therefore hosting resource capacity hard to forecast; how many hundreds of thousands of push

notifications per 10 second period would be required? Not knowing, and not wanting to over-provision

expensive hosting capacity, down-time during peak periods was holding the business back and upsetting

customers.

Platform.sh was able to solve this problem with its innovative clustering technology, and since the migration

the notifications window at kick-off time has reduced to less than a second, which in an industry where every

second counts is very impressive!

Aside from live service issues, Bettracks is also taking huge advantage of the development tool-set native to

platform.sh. The ability to have an environment per branch in the versioning control system (GIT) has allowed

them to accelerate integration with each new partner (currently 11 ‘odds checking’ bookmakers) and the

continuous and onerous cycle of testing changes to each API as they are regularly upgraded and changed. The

speed with each integrations can be switched in, and thereafter modified, is largely dependent on the

guarantee of consistency between environments provided by Platform.sh byte level replication of the master.

Before Platform.sh, it was taking a full day to spin-up a new server, copy across the database and images, and

successfully deploy and test the code base. Platform.sh one-click ‘60 second’ cloning will save us at least 25

days of development and DevOps time over the next year.

“Our goal is to be the preferred choice for placing and tracking football bets

for millions of fans. Key to achieving this is being able to deliver notifications

quicker than the competition. And as for cutting development and testing

costs whilst simultaneously speeding it all up and eliminating all the usual

errors, well that’s just good business sense” said Scott Hooker., “and I bet

you don’t hear that every day!”

This customer migrated to Platform.sh less than 1

week after their evaluation finished and they

signed contracts, finally solving various Drupal

development process constraints and business

critical scaling problems in production.

They are fast approaching 30,000 subscribers,

and during the football season, every week 60

plus games kick-off simultaneously, instigating

500,000 notifications being issued within 10

second windows, resulting in peaks of 4-500

concurrent users throughout the 90 minute

match window.

Platform.sh is a fully automated Git-driven development and hosting PaaS (Platform as a Service) for PHP web applications that manages not only the entire production infrastructure, but also any number of development and staging environments. It extends a branch-merge workflow to infrastructure so that every branch can be tested as if it were in production, and scales for the largest sites. Using Platform.sh increases development velocity and virtually eliminates DevOps.

WHAT BETTRACKS DO

www.bettracks.co.uk offers a centralised

information hub for the football punter, whilst

also catering to more generalised football fans

across the world. It provides a multi-platform live

score service across desktop, tablets and

mobiles. Users are able to personalise their

selections to track any match in any of the major

leagues world- wide, further choosing from a

multitude of options around specific aspects of

the match that they are really interested in.

Bettracks is also the only bet tracker offering

every bet type from first goal scorer to match

outcome. Users are alerted on all major events

via push notifications, which are the fastest in the

industry, with sub 2 second delays between the

ball hitting the back of the net and the subscriber

being notified. Furthermore, users are offered

live betting odds and promotions related to their

selections, for example a Manchester United fan

will be instantly alerted to an odds boost on that

match by one of the bookmakers.

“Bettracks has grown organically since launch in

2010, and is now used by tens of thousands of

football fans across the UK and Europe. In such a

dynamic and fast moving industry such as

iGaming, where the business lives or dies by its

online presence, Bettracks needed a development platform that removed the management overheads of

hosting, the complexity associated with fast Continuous Integration (CI), and the hassle of keeping staging

servers consistent with live, in other words everything that is not core to delivering a fabulous user

experience”, said Scott Hooker, Founder.

PROBLEMS PRIOR TO DISCOVERING PLATFORM.SH

Before moving to Platform.sh, Bettracks were managing themselves with a well- known global hosting vendor.

Being a fast growing business that operates around a varying patterns of huge traffic spikes based on major

sporting events, instant scaling was always going to become the critical issue. Depending on the profile of the

game, its popularity and newsworthiness, spontaneous interest denoted by ‘user tracking’ was difficult to

predict, and therefore hosting resource capacity hard to forecast; how many hundreds of thousands of push

notifications per 10 second period would be required? Not knowing, and not wanting to over-provision

expensive hosting capacity, down-time during peak periods was holding the business back and upsetting

customers.

Platform.sh was able to solve this problem with its innovative clustering technology, and since the migration

the notifications window at kick-off time has reduced to less than a second, which in an industry where every

second counts is very impressive!

Aside from live service issues, Bettracks is also taking huge advantage of the development tool-set native to

platform.sh. The ability to have an environment per branch in the versioning control system (GIT) has allowed

them to accelerate integration with each new partner (currently 11 ‘odds checking’ bookmakers) and the

continuous and onerous cycle of testing changes to each API as they are regularly upgraded and changed. The

speed with each integrations can be switched in, and thereafter modified, is largely dependent on the

guarantee of consistency between environments provided by Platform.sh byte level replication of the master.

Before Platform.sh, it was taking a full day to spin-up a new server, copy across the database and images, and

successfully deploy and test the code base. Platform.sh one-click ‘60 second’ cloning will save us at least 25

days of development and DevOps time over the next year.

“Our goal is to be the preferred choice for placing and tracking football bets

for millions of fans. Key to achieving this is being able to deliver notifications

quicker than the competition. And as for cutting development and testing

costs whilst simultaneously speeding it all up and eliminating all the usual

errors, well that’s just good business sense” said Scott Hooker., “and I bet

you don’t hear that every day!”