Case Study: DARTDrones Scales for Shark Tank Traffic with Kinsta

DARTdrones serves over 1 million page views and scores $300K+ in just a 6-hour period

DARTDrones, an education company offering drone training and Part 107 certification, needed to keep its WooCommerce website online and performant during an expected traffic surge from appearing on Shark Tank. Working with Kinsta, they prepared for the “Shark Tank Effect” and aimed to handle a sudden spike in visitors without downtime.

Kinsta optimized and scaled DARTDrones’ WordPress setup by isolating the site in Linux containers, increasing CPU and PHP thread capacity, and troubleshooting bottlenecks like admin-ajax.php usage and WooCommerce cart fragments. The result was a 50% reduction in page load times, 100% uptime, and the ability to serve over 1 million page views in 6 hours—driving more than 1.26 million requests, 2 TB of cached bandwidth, and helping DARTDrones secure $300,000 from Mark Cuban.

DARTDrones

Kevin McAloon

Designer & Frontend Developer