Sports associations and athletic events around the world want to provide the best experience they can to both athletes and spectators—and that often includes leveraging technology for live tracking, rankings, and more. Sportunity is one of the world’s biggest sports tracking applications, and as they have grown to serve thousands of users per minute, they have leveraged DigitalOcean to improve their application’s performance and deliver exceptional experiences to the athletes and spectators who use their technology.

Performance challenges solved by Premium CPU-Optimized Droplets and Managed Kubernetes

Sportunity was founded by CEO Niels Schut in 2016, and started as a match-making service for those who wanted to play sports with others in a casual format. In 2022, the company had a breakthrough moment when they took over another sports-related application. They decided directly to redo this platform to make it more future proof and scalable and renamed the platform to TRACX. TRACX allows spectators to live track athletes at marathons and other events, view rankings, and more.

Because TRACX can host thousands of users at once during large events, it needs reliable infrastructure and fast performance, without which the application won’t function as expected. As Niels explained, “Live tracking without live data is not live, so the performance of the application must be really fast.”

TRACX was built on DigitalOcean, and when Sportunity took over the product they set about ensuring that the performance was as fast as it could be. They had some challenges with performance in the past, with the app crashing when too many users were on it at once, so they brought in Bram Tervoort, an infrastructure engineer who set out to improve the application’s architecture.

Bram realized that they needed to increase the performance of the application to improve the user experience and ensure that they could accommodate the platform’s growth and periods of high volume traffic. He saw that DigitalOcean had recently introduced Premium Intel CPU-Optimized Droplets, and quickly implemented them to improve the performance of their network intensive workloads. With this performance enhancement, they were able to support the required 2,000 requests per second, and now can handle over 5,000 requests per second.

“The new Intel machines are brilliant. We measured performance and we saw directly when we did the first tests with the new Intel servers, that the performance was way better and faster. They gave us way more speed but also more stability that we need for our platform.” - Bram Tervoort, Infrastructure Engineer

Sportunity now leverages multiple DigitalOcean products as part of their application architecture, including CPU-Optimized Droplets, Managed Kubernetes, and Reserved IPs. Speaking on Reserved IPs, Bram mentioned “Reserved IPs work really well because I can have 2,000 requests per second and then I switch the IP and there’s not a single one dropped.”

Their developers also love using DigitalOcean’s command line tool and API, and use Terraform to quickly deploy changes, with Bram mentioning that when he switched to the new CPU-Optimized servers, the process was simple: “I made a commit to my Terraform code two hours before I went away and tested it and it worked. So I said, okay, let’s see what this does. And the new servers were twice as fast.”

Bram appreciates DigitalOcean’s product suite, which is tailored to the needs of scaling businesses, saying “You can go to other cloud providers and they have a very wide product arrangement. And that’s very nice, but also a bit complicated. And with DigitalOcean, you have managed hosting, but also you can host a lot yourself.”

A solution that works for both the CEO and developers

In addition to the necessary performance enhancements, CEO Niels also wanted to lower their hosting costs. DigitalOcean’s price transparency and lack of surprise costs helped the team keep their budget in check.

“With the larger hosting providers, you get a lot of networking costs and a little bit of cost here and a little bit of cost there. With DigitalOcean, I can quite clearly see that I pay for the machines I use and there’s no egress cost, there’s no network cost, there’s no cost for Kubernetes special features.” - Bram Tervoort, Infrastructure Engineer

DigitalOcean has been an excellent fit for Sportunity because its combination of features and ease of use works well for their development team, and the hands-on approach DigitalOcean takes to customer engagement, as well as the predictable pricing, makes it an attractive choice for their CEO.

DigitalOcean proved to be invaluable during Sportunity’s biggest event to date, when TRACX was handling the live tracking for the Valencia Marathon. Recognizing the anticipated high demand on their application, the team reached out to their account team at DigitalOcean to ensure that they had access to enough servers to support the increase in traffic.

“The contact we have with DigitalOcean is really important to me as a business owner. When we needed additional servers for a large event, our DigitalOcean representative was able to help so we were confident before we started the event that we’d have all the server availability we needed.” - Niels Schut, CEO and Founder

Niels also appreciates that DigitalOcean has been able to meet the needs of all the stakeholders, saying “It’s sometimes a challenge between a developer and the business owner—developers see new functionalities and want to test them out, and for me as a business owner it’s really important to have structured partnerships and a strong relationship with our cloud provider. DigitalOcean satisfies all of those needs.”

As Sportunity looks to scale to support over 3,000 events in the future, they look forward to their continued relationship with DigitalOcean. Niels summed up the impact DigitalOcean has had on Sportunity’s business by saying “When we started this business, we were the best in functionality and features, but we needed to gain full control over our performance. Now with an improved team, good server setup, and DigitalOcean’s help, we are the market leader both by having the best front end product, and we can also handle a lot of traffic and are really good in the performance on the back end.”

With DigitalOcean’s support, Niels is confident he can keep growing his business on reliable infrastructure, keep his developers happy, and provide those who use his app with the best possible experience.