Case Study: ESL Gaming achieves a seamless migration to a scalable hosted community and frees up resources to focus on esports with Higher Logic Vanilla

Moving from Open Source to Vanilla Hosted frees ESL Gaming to Focus on Their Esports Base

ESL, the world’s largest esports company, faced rapid growth and an overwhelmed community management setup. Running a self-hosted Vanilla Forums open source platform, they needed stronger security, SSO, gamification, better analytics, and a scalable, outsourced solution because internal resources were insufficient to maintain the stack for ~350,000 monthly page views and a potential audience of over 6 million. They engaged Higher Logic Vanilla to move from open source to a hosted, managed community platform.

Higher Logic Vanilla delivered its Vanilla Hosted managed services (including custom theming, SSO, gamification with custom badges, and improved analytics) and executed a migration plan that preserved content and user accounts with minimal member impact. The full migration completed in November 2016 after two months of preparation, resulting in a stable, scalable platform able to handle traffic spikes, higher staff satisfaction among forum managers, and freed internal teams to focus on core product and community work.

ESL