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

PLAYzone.cz is the biggest web portal in the Czech Republic and Slovakia that focuses on e-sport. Their main activities are 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 the creation of their own articles. Their portal is visited by more than 250 000 gamers each month.

Furthermore, they organize 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 (Czech computer and mobile game championship, LAN event PLAYzone Challenge).

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.

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

The solution was relatively cheap but only until there was a problem – then its disadvantages showed. They always solved those issues but couldn’t prevent them from happening again. They were also concerned by the reaction time of their people who were primarily dedicating their time to PLAYzone’s core business and this was something extra they had to deal with. On top of things, they couldn’t keep track of the trends in the market, security, backups, etc. That’s why they decided they were ready for a change.

The sales representative of vshosting~ called us at the right time when we already felt that we need 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. 🙂

Migration to vshosting~ gave us peace of mind because we know that all that’s going on in the background of our website is safe and taken care of by experts. That’s especially important because the times have changed and even tournaments/campaigns on PLAYzone are 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 have tested the quality of technical support right out of the gate when our user base grew dramatically due to launching a new platform.

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

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