TrueAchievements is a social network for the Xbox gaming community: 850,000 unique monthly visitors, almost 20 million page views, and a side project that turned into Rich Stone's full-time job. RapidSwitch has scaled with him from a single 1U self-hosted box to a multi-server leased platform.
Meet TrueAchievements
TrueAchievements is a fully-fledged social network for the Xbox gaming community. Developed by Rich Stone, a software developer from East Grinstead in West Sussex, the platform recalculates a gamer's Xbox Live GamerScore using a formula tied to the rarity, and therefore the difficulty, of the achievements they've earned. The harder an achievement, the more points it's worth.
What started as a leaderboard side project quickly turned into a passionate online community that advertisers wanted to tap into. Today the platform serves over 130,000 achievement solutions, 200,000+ community gaming events, 6,000+ game reviews and more than three million forum posts.
What they needed
Rich was juggling a full-time job, building the site, and hosting it himself on a single server. As traffic kept climbing, that quickly stopped being sustainable.
He needed a hosting partner that could deliver three specific things: the ability to host his own hardware, great value for money, and a south-of-England location to keep latency low for his largely UK audience.
How we built it
Rich started by hosting a single 1U server of his own at our Maidenhead data centre. As TrueAchievements' traffic climbed, it became clear that running his own hardware wouldn't keep up, so RapidSwitch's technical team transitioned him to leased dedicated servers.
The team built a high-performance database box specifically for the workload: Dual Intel Xeon Hex-Core L5640, 128GB of memory, and 8 × 2.5" 600GB 10k drives in RAID 10. Three leased servers in total now handle the platform, with on-site spares and engineers on hand whenever hardware needs attention.
“Number crunching jobs that were taking upwards of 14 hours to complete are now done and dusted in under two!”
Where they are today
TrueAchievements now serves over 850,000 unique visitors a month and close to 20 million page views, without ever advertising. The new database server cut the platform's heaviest number-crunching jobs from over 14 hours to under two.
A PlayStation companion site, TrueTrophies, is in the works, and Rich is set to expand his RapidSwitch infrastructure to support it.
