OnApp's Federation PoPs Support Tomorrowland Festival

tomorrowland

Tomorrowland is a massive electronic music festival that occurs in Boom, Belgium. Never heard of it? It sold out days before the event and had a record attendance of 120,000 visitors over two days. So it’s like Woodstock, only with more "beeps" and "boops."

While attendees were most likely powered with unknown substances, its website was powered by a local hosting provider called Stone.is and OnApp. Cloud service provider and content distribution network OnApp provided the capabilities to handle such a global audience.

“OnApp’s federated CDN is the only way we could provide enough global capacity for this size event,” said Stein Van Stichel, Founder and CEO of Stone.is. “We optimized Tomorrowland’s sites to ensure there were no issues with the registration and activation process, and worked with OnApp to ensure we had the global coverage we needed. Using OnApp CDN, we could distribute Tomorrowland traffic from cities all over the world for the launch, and scale back when ticket sales closed. With access to capacity from the OnApp federation, we can design hosting packages for high availability and high load, and guarantee uptime for global brands like Tomorrowland.”

The festival is a perfect example of what kind of customer has extreme traffic fluctuations with a dispersed audience. Fans came from 214 countries, making for a more global audience than attended the Olympics. How does one handle bursts of traffic, spread out over the world? The local hosting provider Stone.is was able to leverage OnApp’s Federated CDN for 46 Points of Presence (PoPs).

The host was able to support one million fans from around the globe who pre-registered for 180,000 Tomorrowland tickets. Two million customers visited the day ticket sales opened, and they were forwarded to Tomorrowland’s ticket system via websites hosted by Stone.is. It supported 4.6 million web pages with a peak of 1.4 million page views in just one hour on ticket sales day, with record-breaking ticket sales that sold in just one second.

OnApp has been building up its federated infrastructure, creating a CDN capable of competing with the big guys. Examples like Tomorrowland show how hosting providers are able to stand up infrastructure previously unavailable or too costly to the traditional provider.

The OnApp federation offers more than 170 points of presence and the potential to add capacity from the 2,000+ OnApp clouds deployed to date across 87 countries. It was a perfect fit for a music festival with a large global fanbase.