Case Study: JD Williams achieves 100% website uptime during 27x traffic spikes with Netacea Virtual Waiting Room

JD Williams - Customer Case Study

JD Williams, part of the N Brown Group and one of Europe’s largest retailers, faced a major risk when a prime-time TV advertising campaign threatened to send unpredictable traffic spikes to its eCommerce sites. With the potential to overload not just JD Williams but 20 other group brands, Head of IT Jeff Cattle sought a solution that could protect infrastructure at the edge; they selected Netacea’s Virtual Waiting Room to stop traffic before it hit their servers.

Netacea implemented a DNS-based Virtual Waiting Room that sat in front of JD Williams’ site, diverting excess visitors into a fair, first-in-first-out queue once a predefined capacity threshold was reached. The system was quick to deploy (via CDN/DNS pointing), provided real-time visibility and machine-learning driven traffic controls, and during the campaign handled a spike 27× larger than their previous peak (Cyber Monday) while preserving site availability—keeping the website online and delivering a controlled customer experience.

JD Williams

Jeff Cattle

Head of IT Services