GiftCard.com Saves 25 Percent in Seasonal Compute Costs with Help from New Relic

GiftCard.com was on a very aggressive growth path, experiencing 100 percent year-over-year growth from 2011 to 2012. This growth presented a serious challenge from an IT perspective, especially considering that the company does a large percentage of its business during the year-end holidays. The company was concerned about scaling to meet anticipated demand during the final quarter of 2012. A few key performance issues were the source of particular concern. Customers often call 1-800-GIFT CARD® to make orders, and the speed of the admin website was having an impact on the overall customer experience. Having slow admin systems means that customers need to stay on the phone longer. For years, the IT team had heard complaints about the speed of admin screens — the average load time was around eight seconds — but they couldn’t identify the source of the problem.

Founded in 2004, GiftCard.com is the largest online store focused solely on gift cards, with hundreds of brands and thousands of designs available to its fast-growing customer base. The company’s philosophy is that a gift card should be as unique as the individual receiving it, giving users the freedom to customize retail gift cards, prepaid Visa cards and e-gift cards deliverable by email or text message. GiftCard.com is PCI-compliant and boasts a stellar A+ rating from the Better Business Bureau. The company is a division of CardLab, Inc., a leading provider of prepaid card programs including IncentiveCardLab.com, PrepaidCardLab.com, Buxx.com and PAYjr.com. GiftCard.com has a core DevOps team in its Dallas headquarters, supported by a large remote IT staff. The company’s environment is built on a massive service-oriented architecture (SOA), with consumer and admin sites running .NET on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Web content management is in Kentico CMS. Some of the company’s smaller sites are written in PHP and serviced by REST APIs.