When SportPursuit founders Adam Pikett, Victoria Walton, and Rhys Jones first set up the company, they needed a platform that would enable them to put together a site quickly and cost-effectively. “We couldn’t commit to long-term server licenses, and we needed a solution that was inexpensive,” says Bryn Snelson, Marketing Director and Director of International at SportPursuit. “Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the quickest way to get SportPursuit.com to that point—it was the most robust cloud services provider out there.”

As the company matured, it has expanded beyond the UK and Europe to include Australia and the U.S., bringing a new set of challenges. “We have a huge number of members, and we push them to the site with a daily email,” Snelson says. “So between 7 a.m. and 10 a.m., we have thousands of concurrent users. We strive for 100 percent availability, which is a challenge.” The site must be available, and latency must be low, or the customer experience will suffer.