Company Overview
OnlineSeats.com is a privately owned ticket brokering company that specializes in the online purchasing and
selling of tickets for major sporting events, concerts, festivals and theatre events.
Synopsis
Since Online Seats inception in 2004, the company has partnered with Triton-Tek for its server and hosting
solution needs. With the goal of developing a low-cost entry strategy, Triton-Tek designed a single server
solution that included implementing Online Seats online ticket purchasing system and providing a reliable,
high-performance web hosting platform.
By 2005, search engine marketing had substantially increased Online Seats web traffic to over 100,000 unique
visitors per month. The company realized that it needed to upgrade its server solution to maintain the system’s
availability, reliability, capacity and response time to effectively fulfill the needs of its customers.
Triton-Tek’s goal was to develop a hosting and server strategy to scale from a single server to a multiple server
model, create an infrastructure that would grow with the company’s increasing web traffic, and do so in a flexible,
cost-effective manner.
Solution
Triton-Tek technologists determined that this situation required development of a multiple, fault tolerant, load
balancing server solution, creation of a flexible, open-ended infrastructure, and further enhancement of the
web-hosting platform. This solution would grow Online Seats site capacity to support over 500,000 visitors per
month, be flexible enough to allow for future upgrades when web traffic further increased, and more importantly,
retain the site’s reliability and download speed.
A solution employing two load balancing servers, backed by a SQL Server, featuring fault tolerant design, was
implemented. The load balancing model was utilized to increase capacity and website response time. Fault tolerant
design ensures that in the event that one server fails, the system continues to operate uninterrupted. The
combination of load balancing and fault tolerant design makes certain the system has no single point of failure.
Dell PowerEdge rackmount servers, featuring Quad-core Intel Xeon processors, were chosen as the server solution for:
- Speed.
- Storage.
- Reliability and manageability.
- Cost-effectiveness.
RCN’s Business Colocation site was chosen to provide the hosting environment due to:
- Bandwidth – 10MB bi-directional pipeline.
- Security – 24/7 building security and Checkpoint Threshold NT card access system.
- Climate control system provides N+1 climate.
- Back-up power featuring an automatic transfer switch generator.
- Fire protection monitoring and building Class E system.
- Cost-effectiveness.
In addition to providing Online Seats flexible, cost-effective server and hosting
solutions, Triton-Tek technologists further reduced the company’s upfront capital
expenditures by providing a Microsoft Service Provider Licensing Agreement (SPLA).
The SPLA provides OnlineSeats.com flexibility in determining server and services
needs without a large upfront capital expenditure.
Finally, Triton-Tek designed the Online Seats server solution with the foresight to require a minimum of
hardware improvements as the company’s web traffic increases. A middle tier server is planned when the
volume of business logic processing starts to stress the web servers presenting user pages.
Results
Since implementing Triton-Tek’s server and web hosting solution in 2005, OnlineSeats.com has experienced
many benefits, including:
- Site capacity has increased to support 500,000 visitors per month.
- Increased reliability - the site possesses a 99.9% uptime rate.
- Improved scalability – the custom system design allows for easy installation of additional web services.
- Marked improvement in customer satisfaction.
- Increased profitability.
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