April 2021 Summaries

Truth Initiative, a nonprofit organization focused on educating teens and young adults about the dangers of nicotine, significantly enhanced its web capabilities through a partnership with Upsun to meet the demands of viral educational campaigns. Originally published under the Platform.sh brand and now updated to reflect Upsun's name, the case study highlights how the organization leveraged Upsun's Platform-as-a-Service to scale their Drupal 8-based websites, truthinitiative.org and thetruth.com, to handle sudden spikes in web traffic, such as a million hits in 24 hours, resulting from campaigns on platforms like TikTok. Upsun's integration with code repositories like GitLab and its inclusion of the Fastly CDN for Varnish caching improved deployment processes and cost-effectiveness, allowing Truth Initiative to migrate smoothly without disruptions and maintain robust site performance. The transition to Upsun in 2020 allowed Truth Initiative to support their evolving anti-nicotine messaging by ensuring their platform could adapt quickly, helping to keep young people informed and engaged in quitting vaping.

SportRx, a company specializing in customized prescription sports eyewear, sought a scalable cloud solution to support its rapid 40% annual growth and overcome limitations with its static infrastructure. Initially using a vendor-hosted setup with no redundancy, SportRx faced challenges in upgrading their servers quickly and maintaining site performance under heavy traffic. To address this, they partnered with Upsun, whose agile infrastructure offered automatic scaling, triple redundancy, and reduced website support requests by 80%. This collaboration allowed SportRx to focus more on enhancing the customer experience while Upsun proactively managed performance issues and provided Magento expertise to stabilize the site. Director of Technology Saaed Fattahi noted the significant improvements in system stability and operational efficiency, indicating plans to expand the use of Upsun's capabilities across additional systems.