Case Study: LitCharts achieves exponential, long-term growth with Heroku

LitCharts Relies on Heroku to Power Exponential Growth Over the Long Term

LitCharts, founded in 2008 and now publishing over 1,400 literature guides read by millions each month, outgrew its original Drupal site on shared hosting. Rapid, exponential traffic growth produced frequent spikes, outages, and little visibility into server health, creating reliability and scaling challenges that threatened the service’s viability.

LitCharts migrated to Heroku’s managed platform, gaining instant scalability, infrastructure management (no dedicated DevOps hire), and integrated CI/CD tools like Heroku Pipelines and Review Apps. The move delivered stability, faster releases, easier collaboration, and quick access to add‑ons (e.g., CloudMailin, New Relic), supported year‑over‑year traffic that more than doubled, and led to an Enterprise upgrade for continued, long‑term growth.

LitCharts

Mike Betten

Chief Technology Officer