[Case Study] How Skate One Skated to Site Uptime, Performance, and Support Wins with Webscale

Since 1976, Skate One has manufactured and distributed high-performance skateboard decks, wheels, bearings, trucks, hardware, clothing, and accessories. They serve both amateur skaters and world-class professionals.

As a direct-to-consumer brand, Skate One’s website (and Magento storefront) sits at the center of their brand and business and, as such, needs to be available 24×7.

The Server Load Gamble

Skate One’s website was previously hosted in a bare metal database server, along with virtual web servers and a load balancer. The infrastructure didn’t auto-scale in any way, so the team had to manually scale the site when extra capacity was needed, and that meant making a call and raising a support ticket.

When Skate One releases new videos or launches a new skateboard deck, their website traffic spikes for anywhere from a few hours to several days. “We were always gambling that we’d be able to handle whatever traffic was thrown at us,” said Jesse Thomas, E-Commerce Group Manager and Web Developer, Skate One.

The Skate One team were spinning up separate hosting environments just to make sure their site could handle the load which, in turn, led to inflated costs as they would inevitably end up overspending for unused capacity.

Skate One required an infrastructure that could automatically scale to cater to huge, unpredictable traffic spikes caused by marketing promotions, new launches and releases. They wanted to ensure 100% uptime for their online storefront, so customers would not experience either slow page load times or service disruptions.

Delivering 100% Uptime and Faster Site Performance with Automation

Webscale provides Skate One with a stable, secure, and rapidly scalable infrastructure in the cloud, without the overhead of designing, implementing, and managing it. Webscale also offers unlimited, real-time, and predictive auto-scaling, capable of forecasting traffic surges, scaling ahead of demand, and ensuring 100% uptime, without any manual intervention. Webscale ensures Skate One’s hosting infrastructure is always right-sized, so they never need to overpay for unused capacity.

In order to enhance site performance, Webscale’s SaaS-based platform optimizes content and image assets automatically so the Skate One team don’t have to invest the time to do them individually. “Since switching to Webscale, our site has been running much faster and we’ve had zero downtime,” said Jesse.

A True Extension to their Team

Webscale’s 24×7 proactive support specialists augment our customer’s own teams, providing infrastructure support as well as recommending optimizations for the chosen e-commerce platform. “One of the reasons we went with Webscale was for the support. They even made suggestions on changes to Magento – they can handle anything. It’s like having a couple extra team members,” said Jesse.

With its experience of managing 1000+ storefronts across many different digital commerce platforms, and with more than 30 accreditations and certifications across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (CGP), and Microsoft Azure, Webscale provides Skate One with peace of mind, when they need it most.

“I can go on vacation and not have to worry about answering my phone at 2:00 am.”

Hear Skate One’s story, in their own words:

If you would like us to help you achieve similar results for your online storefront, drop us a note at sales@webscale.com.