Managing major traffic spikes during ticket drops with Vercel

Managing the complex scaling needs of an online ticketing platform can be challenging. For the French end-to-end ticketing solution Shotgun, ticket drops used to involve stress around scaling and server provisioning. As a company dedicated to providing artists and their fans with the best service, Shotgun now relies on Vercel for seamless launches. So when they drop tickets for artists like Billie Eilish, the team can rest assured their site can handle the traffic.

The need for scalability

In the beginning, Shotgun’s small dev team relied on Heroku. They appreciated its setup simplicity, but soon realized that Heroku couldn’t always scale to handle the traffic their website receives. It’s not uncommon for Shotgun’s consumer site to experience extreme traffic spikes when tickets go live for an event—jumping by 200x in just a few minutes. To prevent site crashes, Shotgun’s engineers would need to manually scale before ticket drops. 

The switch to Vercel took the pressure off of Shotgun’s developers. Instead of manually scaling ahead of time, they can now count on Vercel’s serverless autoscaling during traffic spikes. By using Vercel as their frontend platform and Next.js for their consumer website and dashboard, the team can feel confident during major ticket launches.