Case Study: 99designs achieves peak site performance and faster issue resolution with New Relic

New Relic helps 99designs run at peak performance

99designs is a crowdsourced graphic-design marketplace that connects designers and small businesses worldwide, handling hundreds of thousands of unique visitors and tens of millions of pageviews each month on a PHP-driven stack hosted in AWS. The team needed near-continuous site availability and global page‑load visibility, but relied on periodic manual performance analysis that let problems slip under the radar, making fixes costly and slowing feature delivery.

By installing New Relic’s PHP and Real User Monitoring agents, 99designs gained end-to-end visibility into server and browser behavior, transaction traces, and slow database queries, and built always‑on dashboards for rapid detection. This allowed the team to find root causes (for example, runaway transactions and deployment regressions), prioritize work, save weeks of debugging time, reduce infrastructure waste, and improve user experience and release velocity.

99designs

Lars Yencken

Dev Ops Engineer