Ticket Tailor

Ticket Tailor partners with Cloudflare to provide a smooth COVID-19 vaccine registration experience

Ticket Tailor was founded in 2010 to support event organizers. Ticket Tailor is designed to provide a software-like experience for ticket sales, where the event organizer largely configures and manages their own ticket sales. This keeps the focus on the event organizer rather than the ticketing platform.Ticket Tailor primarily operates in the UK and the US. However, it has a presence in approximately 180 countries, selling tickets to festivals, concerts, TED Talks, and similar events.

In 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic forced a change in direction, and, among other things, Ticket Tailor is currently supporting COVID-19 vaccination registration for two United States hospitals.

Challenge: Massive interest in COVID-19 vaccines overwhelms Ticket Tailor’s infrastructure

Ticket Tailor specializes in selling tickets for in-person events but shifted gears because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Throughout 2020, the company pivoted to support events that suddenly needed the ability to register and schedule visitors in advance, such as museums, food pickups, and farm tours.

Ticket Tailor is currently offering free support to organizations scheduling COVID-19 vaccination appointments. However, the high traffic volumes that are associated with these events can overwhelm the company’s systems. Cloudflare Waiting Room — available via Project Fair Shot — allows the company to implement an online queue for access to their COVID-19 vaccine registration sites.

Cloudflare Waiting Room provides scalability for vaccine registrations

Ticket Tailor is accustomed to traffic spikes with registration for big events, but its backend database can still struggle under the load. According to Jake Gissing, a developer at Ticket Tailor, “There'll be a huge rush of traffic that we struggle to handle without scaling up our infrastructure.”

When the company started supporting COVID-19 vaccine registration, the traffic strained its infrastructure, a problem that Cloudflare Waiting Room helped to resolve. According to Gissing, “Typically, we'll hit about 70% utilization across our web servers and database. Without the queue, that initial spike can last anywhere between one and 20 minutes. With Cloudflare Waiting Room’s queue enabled, we were letting 200 visitors through at a time, and we saw there's no noticeable spike. It was at 10% of capacity. There are no spikes at all, which is really good to see.”

Gissing also commented that Cloudflare Waiting Room was easy to configure and manage. “Setting up the first queue took about five minutes,” he said. “And the mechanism where it refreshes itself works perfectly well for us.”

Lower traffic volumes reduce stress and costs for Ticket Tailor

On the first day of vaccine registration with Cloudflare Waiting Room in place, Ticket Tailor saw about 3,000 visitors looking for 800 vaccine slots. The ability to monitor and configure Cloudflare Waiting Room live was invaluable to the team. “Once I was able to see how much Waiting Room was allowing us to handle, I did tweak it a little bit to allow more people through,” according to Gissing.

Having Waiting Room in place was also a cost-saving measure for Ticket Tailor. Jonny White, founder and CEO of Ticket Tailor, said, “If we knew a vaccination event was going to be opened up, we'd have two people on standby watching the database and taking time out of their day to do that. Whereas with Cloudflare Waiting Room, we can be confident, and the system doesn't require that.”

A perfect solution to Ticket Tailor’s needs

While Cloudflare Waiting Room is currently being used only for COVID-19 vaccination registration via Project Fair Shot, this will not always be the case. Ticket Tailor is looking forward to when it can use the product across its wider customer base for various events. White says, “We will probably use it for everything in the future.”