GoldenSlam brings the world of fantasy sport to tennis buffs across the globe

Everleap Shared Cloud Customer Story
Q&A with Jason Mauss of GoldenSlam Fantasy Tennis

GoldenSlam.com was founded by developer Jason Mauss. Jason started programming when he was a teenager in the 1990s and he has now been developing professionally for 17 years. He is currently a Lead Software Engineer for a data center company. Incidentally, he started playing tennis in high school too.

His love of the game, paired with his programming skills, has led to the creation of the GoldenSlam site. GoldenSlam.com gives tennis fans around the world 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. There is no cost to use the site and play the game. We had a chat with Jason to learn more about his project and what he is bringing to the world of tennis online.

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, about 10 years or so, and have had the domain registered since 2006. Only in the last few years have I had the time to really plug away at it.

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. With tennis, it’s a completely different story and there is a real lack of options in terms of fantasy sport type set-ups online. 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. I talked with other tennis data experts and they shared the same sentiment as me - gathering data for tennis is hard and a pain! 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.

"The pain of gathering advanced stats made me realize that there was an opportunity gap for fantasy tennis and data analysis. So I built GoldenSlam.com around match results and player statistics. I wanted to build the best fantasy tennis game anywhere."
- Jason Mauss, GoldenSlam Fantasy Tennis

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.

What then prompted the shift over to cloud hosting and Everleap?

You sent an email to DiscountASP.NET customers and I said to myself, “Cool, they’re doing cloud based hosting with Microsoft Azure.” I did some Azure Cloud development at work and had an idea of the cloud based capabilities. Prior to this, I did a few things here and there for the site, such as the landing page, but I was not yet serious about the development of it. As I was wrapping up the development, that’s when the email from you came through. It was good timing and I decided to transfer over to Everleap.

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 always signed them up for a traditional shared hosting type thing. It was a pattern and a habit and I would tell my clients, “We can get you set up with shared hosting and it will be fine.” In general, they were simpler sites and not complex.

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.

"The site is built with ASP.NET MVC 5. On the back end I’m running the database on a Private SQL Server."
- Jason Mauss, GoldenSlam Fantasy Tennis

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 Private SQL hosting that clinched it. My set-up called for a database solution that was my own thing. With shared hosting, you are limited with resources and it’s not flexible. Private SQL was perfect and gave me everything I needed.

How do you benefit from the Everleap platform?

With Everleap, you have the processing power and the memory all on demand – this is comforting to think about.

I also like the fact that you have stats around load and demand of the site. I can login into the Control Panel and see requests and the CPU and memory usage that translated to. The system also shows the number of errors and it helped me catch a couple of bugs and fix them as I was deploying my site. Your Control Panel environment has everything I need for developing in one place.

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. This will be helpful in the future. So, if I am hosting video content, I will be able to see the impact with the stats and metrics, and then understand what effect this has on resources.

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 have lots of other plans for the future – a weekly podcast, tournament specific games (versus the season long game I’m currently hosting) and live chats during matches, to name just a few. I know that Everleap will be able to keep up.

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