Deploying a Winning Strategy

How Fanatical Leveled Up Their Operations with ScaleGrid's Management

ABOUT Fanatical

Fanatical launched in the 90s, making affordable software and games available to all on computer CDs, and then transitioned online with the surge of the internet. Their online store has sold over 100 million keys to gamers in over 200 countries. Fast forward to today and their journey continues with Fanatical, now part of the Fandom family, where their goal remains the same; providing the best quality, choice and value in digital entertainment.

Location

Staffordshire, England, U.K.

Industry

Gaming, E-Commerce

Product

ScaleGrid for MongoDB®

Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

The Challenge

Fanatical was looking for a managed database solution for MongoDB®. They had been using a DBaaS solution that significantly increased their price, which spurred the engineering team to search for alternatives. There were several important criteria, including competitive pricing, an easy to use interface, and quality customer service. And it was important to have a company they could depend on to manage their database operations, rather than invest more heavily on dedicated in-house DevOps resources.

The Solution

After searching for a solution that matched their requirements, Fanatical found ScaleGrid’s fully managed hosting service for MongoDB® databases. With ScaleGrid’s Database as a Service solution, Fanatical was able to lower costs while maintaining the ability to scale effectively with growth. They can dynamically scale their MongoDB® CPU, memory, and disk size at any time with just a few clicks.

“We take thousands of orders per day, and the infrastructure doesn’t even break a sweat, which is great.” Jon Burgess, Head of Engineering at Fanatical

ScaleGrid’s easy-to-use interface was another key factor in Fanatical’s choice. The team looked at several providers, and ScaleGrid’s UI came out on top. Top-notch customer support and the availability of databases in different regions were two other benefits that weighed in on their decision to choose ScaleGrid.

“You don’t expect database regional availability to go down, but if it ever did, we’ve got replication elsewhere that can pick up the slack. That gave us peace of mind.” Jon Burgess, Head of Engineering at Fanatical

The Results

Fanatical’s database management is handled by experts, allowing their engineering team to remain streamlined and focused on their core gaming business. With ScaleGrid, they’re saving time and resources since all operational aspects are free with DBaaS plans, including OS patching, log rotations, MongoDB® database upgrades, reporting, metrics, and customer alerts. Fanatical also maintains full admin control of the underlying machine, with peace of mind knowing that ScaleGrid’s intelligent platform can dynamically scale at any time to meet their needs.

“I think one of the main things to highlight is the support team themselves. We’ve had no issues since moving to ScaleGrid. The only time we ever needed to speak to someone was during a migration to a new version of our Mongo database. They were really helpful. They spoke to us, gave us timelines of when we wanted to do it, and it all moved across seamlessly. There was no downtime, and a great experience all around.”