When the Mega Millions jackpot hits record levels, millions of visitors rush to the website to check the winning numbers.

In July of 2023, , the MegaMillions jackpot soared to the second highest level in lottery history: $1,337,000,000. Yes, that’s 1.337 BILLION dollars. Millions of visitors flocked to the MegaMillions website in the hours after that historic drawing.

At its peak, more than half a million visitors per minute were using the site to see if they needed to go to work the next morning. DataYard knows these figures because our team built, maintains, and operates the MegaMillions network and server infrastructure. While most people that night were wondering if they had the winning numbers, DataYard’s team of experienced and dedicated Internet experts were taking steps to improve their online experience – at one point we were serving 10,000 visitors per second!

It takes some technical beef to service millions of web visitors. DataYard has the know-how and the huzpah to pull it all together.

Objective

To ensure a high-visibility site remains operational and responsive during peak traffic periods, which means accommodating millions of visitors within a very short period of time.

The Challenge

Scalability was the primary challenge. The site generally experiences a steady stream of a few thousand visitors. However, a few nights a week, traffic spikes dramatically to millions of visitors within a very short timeframe. This irregular but intense traffic surge demands a robust and scalable infrastructure to prevent downtime and ensure optimal performance during peak periods.

The Solution

• Flexible server design to host applications at scale.
• Geographically diverse infrastructure for redundancy, eliminating single points of failure and improving the site’s resilience.
• Content delivery network and front-end cache to distribute data fast & efficiently, regardless of the users’ location.
• Next generation firewalls to protect the infrastructure against the bad guys, including safeguards against Denial of Service attacks.
• Decades of experience building and operating high-performance servers running on public networks.

The Result

The solution put in place was flawlessly executed – handling the peak traffic surges without a single dropped page. 

As uptime requirements and website traffic increase in the coming years, we’re confident we’ll continue to deliver industry leading service for this world record breaking game. If we can do this for the big game on one of the biggest nights in history, imagine what we can do for your business!