Cloud Infrastructure helps them easily scale resources during peak retail seasons.

Skullcandy (skullcandy.com) is a leading American headphone manufacturer and audio product developer. Skullcandy integrates its audio technology into select brand products from snow helmets to outerwear, apparel, packs and bags. Top retailers and specialty outlets around the world sell Skullcandy gear and apparel.

Founded in 2003 by Rick Alden, Skullcandy quickly grew to become the third largest manufacturer headphone in the U.S. marketplace. In 2008, Fortune Magazine called Skullcandy, “the World’s Coolest Ear Bud,” and on July 6, 2011, Skullcandy launched its IPO.

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Cloud Hosting

As Skullcandy’s business boomed, they needed to scale resources as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, they were hosting at a provider that promised them scalability, but wasn’t prepared for the amount of load that skullcandy.com generates.

According to Skullcandy developer, Andrew Spencer, “We had frequent outages, made worse by increased traffic over the holidays. Some outages lasted hours or even days. The host didn’t even give us tools to fix the problems ourselves.”

Andrew was charged with benchmarking major Magento hosting providers when he learned about XMission Cloud Infrastructure. XMission proposed a mix of fully-managed PHP containers and unmanaged VPS containers, all sitting behind load-balancers to distribute traffic.

XMission Cloud Infrastructure immediately performed better for Skullcandy than any other Magento host. After moving to XMission, additional containers were easily provisioned and added to the cluster to handle the load on Skullcandy’s IPO day and during the holidays.

According to Spencer, “XMission’s support staff is willing to go the extra mile to make sure that our web applications get the best possible performance and reliability.”

“There were times when I would send an urgent request to the XMission team while I moved on to another pressing issue. They would save the day. I know I can count on XMission.”