Case Study: FantasyDraft achieves reliable, scalable game-day availability and 50% lower costs with Amazon Web Services

FantasyDraft - Customer Case Study

FantasyDraft is a Charlotte-based fantasy sports site that lets fans pay to enter contests for cash prizes and experiences. Its biggest challenges were ensuring near-perfect availability during game-day traffic spikes, supporting hundreds of thousands of simultaneous connections, enabling faster, repeatable deployments across multiple environments, and doing all of this cost-effectively as a small company.

Working with Blue Sentry, FantasyDraft migrated to AWS using EC2 with Auto Scaling, Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, and automated deployments via CloudFormation and Ansible with a secondary region for failover. The move delivered reliable 24/7 availability, a 20% increase in site performance, the ability to scale server capacity tenfold for peak football Sundays and automatically for unexpected spikes, faster developer testing and rollouts, and roughly a 50% reduction in compute costs.

FantasyDraft

Tim Weisbrod

Chief Technology Officer and Cofounder