Case Study: FLO Cycling achieves crash-free high-volume sales with Rackspace Technology

FLO Cycling Kisses Site Crashes Goodbye

FLO Cycling, a startup that builds high-performance carbon-fiber bicycle wheels, faced a major e‑commerce problem: although day-to-day traffic was low, intense 30–60 minute spikes during pre-order launches repeatedly crashed their site, causing slow checkout, duplicate charges, database failures and embarrassing downtime across three pre-orders.

They moved to Rackspace’s cloud through its Startup Program and implemented a load balancer with four web servers and a separate database, scaling capacity to 128 GB of RAM for the sale. The result: Pre‑Order 4 ran without a hitch—sold out in 12 minutes—costing only an extra $5.28 for the hour of added capacity and then easily scaling back to a small, affordable configuration.

FLO Cycling

Chris Thornham

Co-Founder