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The client and the context
The Fantacalcio.it adventure began in 1999, initially as a small private website created to help friends manage their teams in the famous fantasy soccer game. Its growing popularity soon transformed the project into a public platform, making it one of the most popular sites among Italian fans of fantasy soccer and soccer in general.
In the early 2000s, the site began to expand: features were introduced for creating and managing leagues, automatically processing scores, and providing in-depth soccer coverage. Through word of mouth, the community grew and the number of registered users multiplied. This gave rise to a true digital community, one that was increasingly discerning and attentive to content.
Over time, Fantacalcio.it has expanded its offerings to include interactive tools, discussion forums, real-time standings, and increasingly detailed statistics, attracting the attention of the media and sponsors. This evolution has been gradual but steady, thanks in part to an increasingly well-structured editorial team and the introduction of cutting-edge technologies for content and data management.
The portal’s consistent focuson technological innovation and high-quality content has, over time, solidified its editorial authority.
Fantasy Soccer Stats
Millions of subscribers
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One million concurrent users
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One billion visits per month
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The challenge
As traffic and engagement increased,the on-premises infrastructure began to show the first signs of strain. During peak times—such as the minutes leading up to the kickoff of matches or immediately after they ended—the site was often inaccessible to many users. Luigi Cutolo explains: “The available resources, particularly the database instances and caching systems, were not designed to support a platform subject to constant and growing traffic spikes.”
The VMEngine Solution
In 2015, the transition to the cloud was completed with the adoption of Amazon Aurora, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon EC2, and Amazon CloudFront. The result was a 500% increase in performance and a significant improvement in scalability.
VMEngine also implements tools to manage traffic spikes on game days, when the number of users can quickly rise from hundreds of thousands to over a million. This dynamic resource management allows the platform to ensure high performance and cost optimization.
Benefits
The migration to the cloud has reduced infrastructure costs by 30% and lightened the workload on the IT team, which has been able to focus on developing new features and growing the site, while leaving the technical management to VMEngine.
In the years that followed, the platform continued to grow, recording a 30% annual increase in users. Innovative features were introduced, such as the ability to create custom tournaments and automated systems for replacing absent players. With over 3 million registered teams and the capacity to handle up to 1 million concurrent users, Fantacalcio.it is now one of the most established digital platforms in the Italian soccer scene.
Looking ahead, the portal plans to evolve further by adopting microservices architectures, while also exploring the opportunities offered by artificial intelligence and machine learning. Having a technology partner like VMEngine enables the company to tackle these challenges with greater agility, while maintaining its focus on continuous product improvement.
"On game days, we can go from 200,000 users to 1 million users in just a few seconds. VMEngine has provided us with a console that allows us to easily schedule a large number of instances and scale significantly."
Luigi Cutolo
CTO - Fantacalcio.it
