The entire Q&A with Jason – and more customer stories – are available on our site.
GoldenSlam.com was founded by developer Jason Mauss. Jason started programming as a teenager in the 1990s and he is currently a Lead Software Engineer for a data center company. GoldenSlam.com gives tennis fans the opportunity to play a fantasy tennis game and follow players, scores and stats from the pro tour, while also being part of a community of individuals passionate about the sport.
Everleap: Thanks for taking the time to talk with us Jason. Tell us a little bit about your site and how it got started.
Jason Mauss: I had the idea for the site kicking around my head for a long time. When you look at other popular sports like hockey, baseball, soccer, and football, they all have data easily available on tons of sites, with all kinds of ways fans can invest themselves in the sport. It used to be that you would just watch your favorite team once a week and that would be about it. Millions of fans can now watch ALL of the games played each week, create their own fantasy rosters and really just live and breathe their sport.
That’s the type of fandom and enthusiasm that has not been possible with tennis and was something that I wanted to help create. There is not much for sources of data. What there is is fragmented and rather inaccessible – definitely not easily found with a simple Google search. What I’ve had to resort to in terms of gathering advanced stats made me realize that there was an opportunity gap for fantasy tennis and data analysis. So I built GoldenSlam.com, centering my game around match results and player statistics. I wanted to build the best fantasy tennis game anywhere. The site is built with ASP.NET MVC 5. On the back end I’m running a SQL Server database.
When you first got GoldenSlam.com off the ground, you were hosted with our shared hosting company DiscountASP.NET. Why did you decide to go with us initially?
I knew that DiscountASP.NET is a Gold Partner with Microsoft and really focused on the Microsoft technology stack. I’ve spent my career building stuff on the Microsoft platform, so it was a good match technology wise.
Cloud hosting was something new for you, right?
I’ve done a lot of web development, both at work and with some side jobs helping businesses build websites. I hadn’t yet worked in a hosting environment with easier scaling and more accessibility. When you build a site, you hope you will get lots of traffic and interest. So, you want to be prepared for that. That’s why I decided to go cloud for GoldenSlam.
As we all know, there are lots of cloud providers. What made you ultimately choose us?
Yes, there are tons of cloud based hosts and options out there. I did quite a bit of shopping around and comparison. What made Everleap the winner was that, for one, I was already familiar with the company and the people. I also liked the fact that I could take my existing site and transfer it over very simply. But it was the Managed SQL hosting that clinched it. With shared hosting, you are limited with resources and it’s not flexible. Managed SQL was perfect and gave me everything I needed.
How has the customer service experience been?
When I first set up my database, I ran into glitches. I had the database backed up and ready to deploy, but I didn’t realize how large the files were and that they needed to be shrunk. I also had database jobs and maintenance tasks that needed to be set up and run periodically. You assisted with all that. I’ve submitted a few support tickets and you’ve always been able to help with a quick turnaround time.
What does the future hold for your site and how does Everleap factor in?
What’s nice about Everleap is that you have visibility – how much bandwidth, how much memory. My ultimate goal for this site is to make it the only source that anyone would need to access match archives and statistical data. If there is tennis data out there that can be aggregated and analyzed, I want to do it with this site and share it with the world. I know that Everleap will be able to keep up.
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