Context
A popular seasonal festival sold tickets through its website during a short, intense window each year. When the gates opened — figuratively and literally — traffic spiked hard and fast.
Problem
The site went down under peak load at exactly the moments it mattered most, during ticket rushes and weather-driven surges. It also needed to serve a significant Chinese-speaking audience that the existing single-language site didn’t.
Approach
I added Chinese localization so the site served its real audience, and migrated the hosting to a load-balanced setup on AWS sized for the spikes rather than the average. The goal was simple: stay up on the busiest days of the year.
Outcome
The peak-traffic outages stopped, ticket sales held up through the rush, and the site reached its Chinese-speaking visitors in their own language.