In recent statistics, the iGaming industry continues to grow and expand. As evidence of this growth and expansion, its global revenue reached approximately $107 billion by the end of 2024 and is projected to reach $510 billion by 2029.
Accordingly, this growth and expansion meant an increasing number of gamers seeking immersive experiences for excellent gameplay. However, the growing number of gamers accessing a gaming platform posed a challenge for its developers to maintain server stability and performance. This challenge is even more apparent during major sporting events or gaming platform promotions.
To handle these web traffic challenges effectively, many iGaming companies turn to cloud services. Below, let us explore how iGaming companies scale their websites to prevent downtime and the best practices they uphold on uptime focus and user load focus to ensure a seamless experience for their users.
Understanding Peak Times in Gaming Activity
Scalability is an essential factor that iGaming platforms must consider as they grow to accommodate increasing user demand. In brief, scalability means the ability of a system or a platform to respond to increasing demands from its users without significantly degrading the quality of the interactive and immersive experience they provide. This scalability factor is important for gaming platforms in the industry to avoid website crashes, slow load times, and poor gaming experiences.
As such, most online casinos and other gaming platforms leverage technology to meet user demands. Australia, a country known for its tech-forward approach, uses cloud technology to power gaming platforms like those offering an online pokies no deposit bonus, ensuring they can handle heavy web traffic without a hitch. Such use of cloud technology is also done to provide users with a risk-free and enhanced gaming experience, along with free bonus credits.
Accordingly, the most common cloud services adopted are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). These cloud services offer scalable solutions that help an online casino or other iGaming platform reduce latency and adapt to fluctuating traffic levels in real time, especially in peak gaming hours.
The Best Practices to Handle Uptime & User Load Management in iGaming
To ensure optimal performance while handling uptime and user load management in gaming platforms, its developers are required to adopt the best practices. If you are a game developer and are aiming to have your gaming platform recognized as top-notch in the industry, investing in the enumerated best practices below might be a good way to go:
1. Conduct Routine Stress Testing:
Most iGaming platforms often run a series of promotional gaming events. Accordingly, these events stimulate peak traffic situations that may signify increased player engagement. As such, most gaming platforms prepare for the said scenario so that when it happens, users can enjoy a seamless gaming experience.
Most iGaming platforms conduct routine stress testing, which involves simulating high traffic loads. This simulation is done to identify the platform’s breaking points and efficiently fix them so that by the time actual peak traffic scenarios happen, the system’s platform can manage user demand without crashing.
2. Apply Application-Aware Load Balancers
Once developers have identified the gaming platform’s breaking points, it is time to apply load balancers.
Applying load balancers is the practice of distributing computational workloads dynamically across adopted cloud services to support the platform. Through load balancing, it directs and controls internet traffic between the application’s servers and visitors. Once the process is completed, the iGaming platform gets to improve its scalability and performance.
For illustration, suppose a gamer plays a round of poker. Part of playing poker includes low-latency responses. These responses are often detected after actions like raising the stakes or folding. Accordingly, it is necessary for the user to immediately respond as to what their next move should be. This is where load balancing comes in. To support required real-time responsiveness, application-aware load balancers might be necessary.
3. Implement Dynamic Scaling of Servers
Lastly, adopting auto-scaling policies is also one of the best practices to handle uptime and user load focus.
Implementing dynamic scaling on an online casino platform ensures that traffic resources are allocated efficiently according to real-time demand. Additionally, especially for those that implement auto-scaling features, it helps the online casino platform to identify when there is an uptick in traffic or not.
Closing Points
There is no debate surrounding the fact that the iGaming industry continues to expand and evolve.
However, the consequence of this expansion and evolution always comes with a price. As online casinos grapple with scalability issues, adopting a quality cloud service and best practices, especially when handling uptime and user load management, becomes essential. This is to ensure a seamless gaming experience for users while also maintaining security and compliance standards.
By adopting the above-enumerated best practices, iGaming operators can provide a consistently thrilling gaming experience, and as a potential result, attract a loyal player base to solidify their position in a competitive and rapidly growing market.