Each Christmas and spring, MFPA post 100,000s of packs with cards and calendars in. They then hope that recipients will post them a cheque or go online to pay for the pack. Hopefully they will also buy more. The generates seriously highly volumes of traffic for a relatively short period of time. The website needs to be rock-solid because any downtime could be very expensive.
The website is built in Umbraco CMS with an e-commerce plugin called Vendr. I needed to use almost every feature available to us in Vendr in order to meet requirements such as:
- discount codes
- dynamic products (design a card)
- contributions
- customer & internal emails
The website also has a large amount of imagery and news on it.
A number of powerful load balanced servers would be ideal for this website, except that the traffic is so seasonal. To keep costs down the hosting is pretty modest, which meant that I needed to make the website extremely performant. I also added Cloudflare to help with caching.
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