Case Study: Crowd Content achieves 240% customer growth, 20% faster page loads and zero-downtime reliability with DigitalOcean

How Crowd Content Uses DigitalOcean

Crowd Content is a Victoria, BC–based marketplace (founded 2011) that connects businesses with vetted freelance writers for blogs, product descriptions, social posts and more. Because clients range from one-person startups to enterprises and demand content 24/7, the company needed a highly available, flexible platform that could scale quickly to handle large and unpredictable traffic spikes without compromising performance or reliability.

Crowd Content moved about 95% of its infrastructure to DigitalOcean, using Droplets, Block Storage, Spaces, Cloud Firewalls, Docker Swarm, HAProxy load balancers with Floating IPs, and a Percona XtraDB cluster with ProxySQL, plus snapshots and automation scripts for rapid scaling. The result: faster pages (20% improvement after switching to optimized Droplets), zero downtime for database maintenance, dramatic growth (240% increase in customers since their first Droplet and a tenfold increase in writers), and strong business momentum (5,000+ writers, 27 million words delivered in 2017 and 56% year‑over‑year revenue growth).

Crowd Content

Eric Hoppe

Director of Marketing