Case Study: AO.com achieves uninterrupted peak sales and bot protection with Netacea's Virtual Waiting Room

AO.com - Customer Case Study

AO.com, a multi-award winning eCommerce retailer offering over 4,000 products, faced a major challenge when a highly successful Black Friday campaign in 2014 produced a traffic surge that pushed their infrastructure to the brink. To prevent a repeat, AO.com engaged Netacea in 2015 to deploy its Virtual Waiting Room and provide specialist performance testing and traffic analysis ahead of peak events.

Netacea implemented a Virtual Waiting Room alongside Bot Detection (first in observation mode, then in protection mode) and helped AO.com re-engineer for auto-scaling while identifying and blocking malicious bot traffic. As a result, Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2015 delivered revenues beyond previous events, the site remained available and fast throughout the weekend, and AO.com reduced bot-driven load—freeing capacity for more human shoppers and enabling more confident flash-sale activity.

AO.com

Adam Warne

Group IT Director