Case Study: Vegepod (Australian ecommerce garden kit maker) achieves 95% site uptime during Shark Tank finale with WP Engine

Scaling Ecommerce for Season Finale Success

Vegepod, an Australian maker of easy-to-use home garden kits, faced a high-stakes challenge when they prepared to appear on the season finale of Shark Tank Australia: their existing overseas hosting in Singapore caused latency and risked downtime from a sudden surge in traffic. Working with digital agency Elephant Room, they needed a fast, reliable way to scale the ecommerce site for the live broadcast.

Elephant Room rebuilt Vegepod on WordPress and migrated the site to WP Engine with Australian datacenters, CDN, HTTP/2, and optimized caching — completing the migration in under two hours with WP Engine support. The result: the site handled about 11,000 sessions during the finale with 95% uptime (a brief, one-minute outage caused by an Instagram plugin), other contestants’ sites crashed while Vegepod continued to sell via WooCommerce, and the company even secured the Shark Tank deal.

Vegepod

Matt Harris

CEO and Founder