Gamers on PLAYzone.cz, the largest e-sports portal in the Czech Republic, are using vshosting~ servers

About PLAYzone.cz

PLAYzone.cz is the biggest web portal in the Czech Republic and Slovakia that focuses on e-sports. Their main focus is providing daily news from the world of local and international e-sport, such as transfers between teams, reports from important events, interviews with interesting people, as well as writing their own articles. Their portal is visited by more than 250,000 gamers each month.

Furthermore, they organise regular tournaments that take place almost every day. Both computer and mobile players can participate. In addition, they offer a number of community services and serve as an information medium for our other projects (the Czech computer and mobile game championship, the PLAYzone Challenge LAN event ).

What does their website run on?

The base of the PLAYzone.cz website is PHP7 and Drupal 8. They also use Redis storage for better caching and the Git versioning system.

The website runs on the Drupal CMS and the PLAYzone team manages it on its own. However, the development is provided by an external company.

The evolution of PLAYzone’s hosting solution

Since 2008, they’ve had their own physical server in a small housing centre. Unfortunately, its performance soon started to suffer so PLAYzone added a database server and, later on, a file server.

The solution was relatively cheap until there was a problem – then its downsides became evident. They always solved such issues but couldn’t prevent them from happening again. They were also concerned by the response time of their employees who were primarily dedicating their time to PLAYzone’s core business and this issue resolving was an extra thing they had to deal with. Furthermore, they couldn’t keep track of current market trends such as security, backups, etc. That’s why they decided they were ready for a change.

Why PLAYzone chose vshosting~, in their own words

The vshosting~ sales representative called us at the right time as we already felt that we needed to change our hosting solution. We received a number of offers, perhaps it helped that Mr. Lintimer was a gamer and used our site – we were on a similar wavelength that way.

The migration to vshosting~ gave us peace of mind because we know that everything that’s going on in the background of our website is safe and taken care of by experts. That’s especially important because times have changed and even tournaments/campaigns on PLAYzone are now a business. Before that, when our website went down, we disappointed the players, but more and more this has also become a problem for our partners who paid for campaigns. With our previous solution, we couldn’t trust that everything was under control. We tested the quality of the technical support right out of the gate when our user base grew dramatically due to launching a new platform.

Vshosting~ reacted promptly of their own accord so no slowdown occurred, much less a ‘server down’ type of situation. As a result, we don’t need to have an in-house person taking care of the servers, keeping up with recent trends and whatnot. At a first glance, a solution from vshosting~ may seem like the more expensive option but it proves to be a major time and money saver for us. Not to mention the lack of worry. Now we can focus solely on our business.

The hosting solution they opted for

PLAYzone is currently using a duo of managed servers, one of which is an application server and the other serves as a database server. They’re very happy that both servers are fully administered by vshosting~ experts and they can focus on what they run on them.