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Case study · Cars
Surviving the closing minute.
Nothing happens for six days. Then every bidder arrives at once. Auction platforms are judged on sixty seconds a week.
The problem
A leading European car auction house was watching performance degrade exactly when it mattered. As lots approached closing, traffic surged, load times stretched, and in the worst cases the site failed. Every one of those seconds is a bid that did not get placed, and the damage is not only the lost revenue — a bidder who could not bid does not fully trust the next sale either.
Why standard hosting does not solve it
Provisioning for average load leaves you short at the peak. Provisioning for the peak means paying for capacity that sits idle almost all the time. Auction traffic has one of the most extreme peak-to-average ratios of any application category, which makes the usual compromise unusually bad.
What we did
Automatic scaling, hosted on Microsoft Azure. Capacity expands in real time as traffic climbs into the closing phase and contracts afterwards, so the platform is sized to the moment rather than to a plan. Azure's global infrastructure supplies the redundancy and security underneath.
Result
Auctions complete through peak traffic without degradation. Bidding stays responsive in the final minutes, which is when competitive bidding actually determines the hammer price. The client's infrastructure now grows with the business instead of being re-planned each time volumes rise.
Where the experience came from
We learned this on the largest platforms in the market. In the early 2000s we ran the technology behind Troostwijk and BVA, then Europe's biggest auction portals, and dealt with their traffic and their auction logistics. After those businesses were acquired, others from the same ecosystem — Epic Auctions among them — stayed with us.