Case Study: YouCaring achieves uninterrupted availability during a $37M Hurricane Harvey donation surge with Rackspace Technology

YouCaring - Customer Case Study

YouCaring is a free, compassionate crowdfunding platform that helps individuals, families and nonprofits raise money for medical needs, disaster relief and other hardships. During Hurricane Harvey a high-profile J.J. Watt fundraiser drove an unprecedented load—peaking at about 20,000 donations per minute and ultimately raising $37 million—exposing database and performance limits that threatened site availability during a critical moment.

Rackspace provided managed hosting and cloud services (dedicated servers, OpenStack public cloud) plus professional database expertise to tune indexes, optimize code and scale the environment rather than simply adding hardware. The intervention stabilized performance (server utilization stayed low), kept the site online through the surge, enabled the $37M campaign to complete successfully, and established an ongoing 24/7 support partnership so YouCaring can focus on its mission.

YouCaring

Jesse Boland

Director of Online Marketing