Mood Fabrics is one of the most iconic names in fashion and sewing, best known for its prominent role on the hit reality series Project Runway. For years, contestants on the show sourced their fabrics from Mood’s legendary New York store, making “Thank you, Mood!” a signature catchphrase. With locations in New York and Los Angeles, an expansive ecommerce site, and a loyal following of sewists, designers and DIY enthusiasts, Mood is a destination for anyone passionate about fashion and textiles.
Since 2021, Mood Fabrics has relied on JetRails for managed hosting on a scalable AWS Elastic Cloud environment, a platform that ensures flexibility, reliability and high performance for their ecommerce store and blog, ‘The Mood Sewciety.’
In early 2025, Mood approached JetRails with an exciting challenge: They had entered a contest with Google Gemini, with the potential prize of a Super Bowl commercial slot. With no way to predict whether the ad would air regionally or nationally, JetRails was tasked with ensuring Mood’s online presence could withstand a traffic surge of any scale, whether thousands or millions of visitors. JetRails was tasked with ensuring Mood’s online presence could withstand a traffic surge of any scale.
The risks were significant. With its reputation and revenue on the line, Mood needed absolute confidence that its ecommerce store and blog would stay online, fast and fully functional, even if millions of potential new customers flooded the site after seeing the ad.
The preparation was complicated by the fact that no firm traffic projections were provided by Google nor the Super Bowl teams. JetRails had to plan for everything from a modest regional bump to a nationwide rush.
As a final failsafe, JetRails also configured a “waiting room” feature, which could queue visitors if traffic ever exceeded infrastructure capacity, ensuring the site would never go completely offline, even in a worst-case scenario.
JetRails’ load tests simulated a wide range of traffic conditions, preparing Mood for anything from a mild regional surge to an all-out national traffic wave.
Simulated traffic peaked at 12,940 concurrent visitors, pushing database CPU utilization to 94%. This exercise provided critical insights into application-level performance under pressure.
JetRails ramped traffic even higher, simulating a 49,270 concurrent visitor spike, with total simulated visits surpassing 1.3 million in a single day.
Testing hardware maxed out at 50,000 concurrent visitors, but the site itself still had room to handle more.
Concurrent visitors at peak traffic
Site availability with no slowdowns
In the end, Mood’s ad aired regionally, rather than nationally. The result was a sharp but manageable traffic spike, well within the limits of the environment JetRails had prepared.
Even after the Super Bowl, JetRails continues to optimize Mood’s environment, including a permanent upgrade to Graviton4 CPUs, providing faster performance and greater efficiency for future traffic peaks.
“We’ve trusted JetRails with our hosting for years, so when this opportunity came up, we knew we were in good hands. They worked alongside our team to prepare for every scenario, even the ones that never happened. When the traffic hit, everything worked exactly the way it was supposed to, and we could focus on our customers, not our tech.”
Eric Sauma
Co-Owner
Performance reviews and load tests take time. Don’t wait until the last minute.
Traditional hardware can’t adapt fast enough.
Not just the servers, but the entire shopping journey.
Even regional campaigns can drive significant traffic spikes.
