Polker.game: How We Transformed a Troubled Website into a High-Performing AWS Stack

The Opportunity

Polker.game was operating as a WordPress website on a shared hosting environment, which resulted in the website experiencing frequent errors, specifically 429 Too Many Requests. In an attempt to remedy this, the Polker team tried to set up the website on both an AWS EKS cluster and an EC2 instance. However, both configurations led to further issues, specifically 503 errors. These issues were common configuration challenges, with shared web hosts limiting customer requests or CPU usage, and instance/container based systems requiring effective management of memory for the PHP-fpm process. Moreover, all attempted solutions used the same resource for both the database and PHP services, despite their different resource requirements.

Our Solution

Our solution was to move the Polker.game website to a new sub account of their existing AWS set up. In this new account, we established an appropriate web hosting stack, consisting of a Content Delivery Network (CDN), Web Server, and Database Cluster. By delivering website pages through specialist services, we were able to handle larger amounts of traffic while reducing running costs, including backing up all data through EC2 Lifecycle manager and RDS. Our set up was based on existing configuration scripts used for other customers, which allowed us to provide testing environments for the website at no extra cost. Over time, we monitored and made adjustments to the server environment, and provided instructions to allow the Polker team to maintain the system on their own. We also assisted with server-based creation of staging and development sites, though we enabled the team to do this on their own as well.