Last week CloudFlare received a call from the team at The Pumpkin Lady. They are currently preparing for their busiest week of the year and were looking to CloudFlare to help with their increase in traffic.As you may tell, pumpkinlady.com is a website dedicated to pumpkin carving. A talented woman has created a thriving business by offering pumpkin carving patterns to people all over the world. This online business has a global audience, attracting its largest audience from Europe.
Each year, as households look for carving inspiration, The Pumpkin Lady has to handle a large increase in traffic. October is their busiest month, typically seeing 15 times more traffic compared to the rest of the year.This year, The Pumpkin Lady started to use CloudFlare. They heard about us through our partnership with WP Total Cache. Here's what happened, in their own words, after they installed CloudFlare.
From pumpkinlady.com:I've been ecstatic over great purchases before...you know, the ones that you run out and tell all your friends about, the ones that make your day a little brighter...When I signed up with CloudFlare, however, it was more of a Quad Vente White Mocha caffeine buzz combined with Rocks You Like a Hurricane blaring to the point of speaker distortion all the while praying that there are no police around because I can't keep my foot of the gas" type of experience!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. 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. 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.
I was determined to set up our infrastructure this year in a way that would prevent us from having to move from the shared hosting environment. Fortunately, I came across CloudFlare. In the month of October alone, CloudFlare has saved us about 1.54 Terabytes...not Gigabytes...Terabytes! The bandwidth alone was enough to blow my mind, but I was floored when I saw the amount of requests that were saved. Out of 140,851,468 requests in the past 30 days, CloudFlare saved us 136,604,571 requests.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.
Jack Berberette ~ Vice-President ~ The Pumpkin Lady, Inc._I'm the Pumpkin Lady's hubby ~ She's the artist, I just handle the techie stuff.The Pumpkin Lady is a Pro customer which costs $20 per month. The service has saved them hundreds of dollars during this busy time. The layer of security and expanded capacity let's their team focus on delivering an awesome experience to their customers.With a week until All Hallow's Eve, if you are looking for pumpkin carving inspiration, I encourage you to check out The Pumpkin Lady. It will be online throughout the holiday!_