![\"\"](\"https:\/\/upcloud.com\/media\/sport-monks-logo.png\"){kind=logo}
<\/figure>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nAbout\u00a0SportMonks<\/h2>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
SportMonks\u00a0started out as\u00a0a company under the name Soccerema with an idea for a web-based football game<\/a>, soccer to those from the US, using real match results and player information. The game needed data\u00a0on all football matches, players, location,\u00a0games and a lot more.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n While the game itself did not get a lot of players,\u00a0we received\u00a0a number\u00a0of\u00a0questions\u00a0about our data. Due to the popular demand, we developed an API to match data. This turned out to be the start of a new part in our story\u00a0and how\u00a0the data used for the game became the product. We pivoted to publishing and making the data available to all and so SportMonks\u00a0was born.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n We offer a public API to our sports data at SportMonks.com. Though we have our\u00a0origins\u00a0in football (or soccer), we are expanding to other sports like Formula 1 racing, Basketball, Baseball and Hockey to name a few.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n With the help of a cloud hosting provider Twisted Bytes<\/a>, we migrated our\u00a0old servers\u00a0from DigitalOcean, which struggled with the load, to a highly optimized set of cloud servers that\u00a0are able to handle a lot more customers. We\u00a0continue to get suggestions for ways to optimize the code and resources from Twisted Bytes. We are really happy about having chosen UpCloud and following up on their recommendation to get in contact with Twisted Bytes.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n When we started the API, we had\u00a0built everything by using the standard way to create and manage cloud servers from the framework we use, Laravel. But when the number of customers and API requests began to increase\u00a0the servers started struggling to handle it all. In an attempt to cope with the increased demand\u00a0we scaled up\u00a0our backend to the extreme.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n We are developers not system administrators or DevOps, therefore we needed somebody with the knowledge about squeezing every bit of performance out of the cloud servers. Because simply adding\u00a0more resources will not always solve the developers’ problems.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n After working with Twisted Bytes and UpCloud to migrate and tune our new cloud servers, it became clear that the old setup could have handled the load\u00a0with better optimisation\u00a0according to the size of the backend. But default setups do\u00a0not provide the level of finesse required.\u00a0We also needed someone who could take the time to monitor the application, the site, and the servers to see what is going on.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nPrevious challenges<\/h2>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n