A campaign site is quiet until something happens on television, and then it takes a year of donations in an hour. That surge cannot be scheduled.
Traffic arrives within minutes, most of it wants to give money or sign up, and both of those are database writes.
A debate moment does not come with a calendar invite, so scaling happens automatically and fast rather than being something you request while the traffic is already arriving.
Campaign sites attract attackers the day they launch, so rate limiting, bot filtering and edge firewall rules are on at go-live rather than added after the first incident.
Volunteer and donation forms are writes, which no cache can absorb, so the database is sized for concurrent inserts rather than for read throughput.
Names, addresses and giving records are encrypted at rest and access to them is logged, because a supporter list is the most sensitive thing a campaign holds.
Campaigns finish. Archiving, exporting supporter data and winding the site down are agreed up front rather than improvised the morning after the result.
In a surge the questions are simple and urgent: is the donation page up, are the forms writing, and is anything being dropped on the floor.
The surge is made entirely of people who want to do something. Every one of those actions is a database write, and writes are what fall over first.
These are the settings that differ from a standard WordPress site on the same plan. Each follows from load that arrives without notice and consists mostly of writes.
| Setting | What we do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Scaling trigger | Automatic and aggressive, with no approval step | A surge that needs a support ticket to be handled has already been missed by the time somebody reads the ticket. |
| Full-page cache | Bypassed on donation, volunteer and pledge URLs | Every valuable action on a campaign site is a form submission, and a cached form page is one that quietly stops recording them. |
| Database connections | Pool sized for concurrent inserts rather than reads | The surge is people signing up simultaneously, which saturates write capacity long before it troubles read capacity. |
| Edge security rules | Firewall, bot filtering and rate limits enabled at launch | Campaign sites are targeted from the day the domain resolves, not from the day they get busy. |
| End-of-campaign handling | Scheduled export and archive plan agreed at signup | Supporter data outlives the campaign, and deciding what happens to it on election night is far too late. |
Every plan includes free migration, daily backups, SSL and 24/7 support.
Free migration, scaling that does not wait for approval, and donation pages that stay up.