How do virtual waiting rooms work?
A deep dive into how virtual waiting rooms and queue management systems work to prevent system overloads and crashes; Know from Queue Fair Experts.
A Virtual Waiting Room is a page that holds visitors away from a busy website, and feeds them back to the protected website at a rate it can handle while still maintaining responsiveness and performance. This means websites can handle unexpected or sudden peaks in traffic without website crashes, and without having to waste energy powering additional servers when things are not busy, so it's green tech too when implemented well.
Fair Virtual Waiting Rooms pass visitors back in First-Come, First-Served order. A good Virtual Waiting Room should also keep the visitor fully informed of their progress and remaining wait. There's nothing worse for your business than a crashed site.
A visitor comes to your website, opens your app or taps a link
If busy, the user is queued in a Virtual Waiting Room away from your web site
The user returns to your website when they reach the front of the queue
Our patented fair process queues people as they reach pages or app screens you wish to protect, either on a timed schedule, or automatically if your site or app gets busy unexpectedly. If you need to queue people before they reach your servers we can do that too - use our Network-Edge or Direct Link integration methods. When your site is not busy, people don't see a queue page - just your site as they normally see.
‘Queue-Fair is great for our large online retail event. It came across as very intuitive to use and worked absolutely fine. Queue-Fair provides continuity and increases confidence for customer online experience. We definitely have plans for Queue-Fair in the future for events where we are expecting a huge deluge of traffic and participation in larger retail events.’
‘Great platform! Queue-Fair is really easy to use, with great customer support - always respond quickly and clearly. The great live reporting helped us monitor traffic during event launches accurately, and was easy to integrate and brand too. Queue-Fair ensures everyone gets a fair chance at attending our events, which we really value.’
‘Great tool saved our shop. Customer service is very good. Queue-Fair solves server saturation for us on busy ticket onsales. The setup was easy and I liked the efficiency of the tool.’
‘Efficient and Reliable Queue Management System. What stands out the most about Queue-Fair is its ease of use and seamless integration into our existing platform. It helped us manage large-scale traffic spikes without causing downtime or disruptions, ensuring a smooth user experience. The real-time data and customer support are also exceptional, providing us with the tools to keep everything running smoothly during high-demand events. Queue-Fair helps us manage sudden surges in website traffic effectively. By implementing the virtual waiting room, we are able to ensure that no users experience downtime or delays, even during high-demand events.’
‘A Reliable Solution for Seamless Customer Flow Management. We've had the opportunity to use Queue-Fair with several clients, and we couldn't be more satisfied with the results. Queue-Fair excels> in providing a seamless user experience, making it a reliable tool that’s easy to integrate and use. The Queue-Fair support team was responsive and highly knowledgeable, always quick to assist when we needed them. The product quality shines through. Queue-Fair effectively solved the challenge of managing high-traffic surges, ensuring that our clients' websites could handle large volumes of users without compromising performance or user experience.’
‘Reduced the stress of our online store launch day! We launched a brand new website on the same day that we opened for orders this year. Launch day provides a huge rush of customers to our website and having Queue-Fair in place helped us to feel at ease throughout this experience. We received zero emails from customers about the queue (which we attribute as a sign that it was all working well). The queue was easy to integrate into our website. Our experience with the Queue-Fair team was smooth and professional, and best of all our customers had a great experience! We appreciated the peace of mind that having Queue-Fair provided.’
‘We have events which are extremely popular resulting in large numbers of people hitting our website at one time. Queue-Fair helps manage that, solving the problem. We best liked the support during set up and the ease of use. We recommend Queue-Fair because it is an excellent alternative to other queue providers, offering excellent support.’
‘We needed a solution for Black Friday! Queue-Fair was happy to suit a solution for our need for this occasion, offering a great rate and excellent customer service. We could set up our own personalized waiting page room, our own entrance rate, all well-tailored to our measure. If you need a tailor-made solution that won't empty your pockets, Queue-Fair is the way to go!’
‘Quality product and Reliable Service. We were shocked at how fast it was to set up and how easy it was to use. The product worked exactly as intended. We want to thank the Queue-Fair team for making the process seamless and for their support for helping us with the set up. When we have similar events, we will be sure to use Queue-Fair.’
‘Excellent service. We use Queue-Fair monthly and it has been working great. We called Queue-Fair on Sunday evening because we were doing a drop. They answered immediately and solved the problem within five minutes! They saved our drop and did everything very quickly!’
‘It's amazing! Queue-Fair rocks! Queue-Fair was incredibly useful in controlling the volume of traffic on our website, resulting in a seamless and enjoyable user experience. The system and service are first-rate. Thank you very much Queue-Fair!’
‘We turned to Queue-Fair to help our popular booking service during peak times. It took the load off our servers as you would expect - that's its job. Queue-Fair has been great experience-wise and we're very happy - it's great customer service like this that makes all the difference. We'd happily turn around to other customers and tell them, "Use this system!" The Queue-Fair system is really flexible and I can see that it is working for us - at a great price too. I think it's a brilliant service - I can't praise it enough. My last two weekends have been the most relaxing ones I've had in months - Queue-Fair has completely de-stressed the situation for us. I'd even go so far as to say it has saved my mental health - it's fantastic!’
High-profile crashes don't just harm your servers, they harm your reputation. Protect your customers' good will with a smooth branded journey.
Satisfaction
Show your customers that fairness matters with our original first-in, first-out Virtual Waiting Room technology. Start experiencing the benefits of queue psychology, and find out how social proof can increase your sales.
Manage all aspects of the Virtual Waiting Room experience with our online Portal admin and reporting platform, from anywhere at any time.
Control
Customise any aspect of the Virtual Waiting Room presentation with our intuitive tools. Change your settings, messaging, analyse traffic in real time and develop insights for future online events and sales with our award-winning statistics suite.
We can stop your website crashing under the weight of bots or DoS attacks. Queue-Fair ensures your tickets go to genuine fans, not touts.
SafeGuard
Use our advanced Security Gates and Captcha integration to automatically sort the genuine customers from the chaff, and enforce one-order-per-customer. Prevents people accessing your order pages without queuing fairly too.
You've probably noticed the high traffic that happens at your site before your tickets even go on sale, as keen buyers rush to your website to be the first to buy. We help you cope with these kinds of peaks too by giving you a PreSale Page, with a nifty countdown clock.
Viewers on the PreSale page automatically go through to the queue when the sale opens, optionally with a random position so that all visitors who arrive before a queue opens are treated equitably and fairly.
If that sounds like what you want, then we also ensure that people who don't see the PreSale page because they arrive after the sale has opened are served on a first-come, first-served basis - but behind those who have seen the PreSale page and are online and ready to buy at opening time.
Whatever method you choose, our system targets the desired flow rate (users per minute) to your website or e-commerce platform when deciding when to put through the next person in line. You specify the flow rate and can make the queue go faster or slower instantly at any time. Unlike Virtual Waiting Rooms from some other providers, so long as there are buyers online, you'll never find yourself waiting for customers to arrive.
When you're at the end of your sale, with just a few items left in timing-out baskets, you can even let buyers through from the front of the queue one at a time with our unique Admit One button, so you can safely and completely sell out your stock in one sales event, avoiding the twin risks of selling more stock than you have available, and the risk of having unsold items from abandoned shopping baskets left over at the end.
Queue-Fair protects your site from crashing from people hitting refresh, refresh, refresh before the sale starts, as well as controlling the flow of visitors during your online event.
Queue-Fair only queues visitors to your website in a Virtual Waiting Room when needed, in order to prevent the flow rate exceeding the limit you specify. You can easily install the Queue-Fair Adapter on every page of your website to defend against sudden spikes 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365.25 days a year. The Queue will turn on automatically if more visitors arrive than the threshold you choose, which you can change instantly any time.
Queue-Fair gives you peace of mind that your website will not crash under high demand. You can choose whether to protect your whole site, or just the pages that you expect to be busy, allowing other visitors to use the rest of your site without seeing a queue.
Our versatile Dynamic Targeting system means we can also ensure that every user gets back from the Virtual Waiting Room to wherever he or she is expecting to go - even if they all want different pages. You don't need to set up a separate queue for every page when just one Virtual Waiting Room protects your back end processes, whichever page on your site gets busy.
The queue will automatically start showing queue pages to visitors the very moment that traffic exceeds the SafeGuard Rate that you specify in the Queue-Fair Portal, without delay.
Not all web pages are created equal. Your web server can serve basic 'flat' content most easily. It has a harder job serving up database content like product pages or personalised content like shopping carts, but the trickiest job of all is handling the checkout and payment process - and if you have too many people trying to do this at the same time, that results in a crashed site. While of course you can use an easy simple single Queue-Fair Virtual Waiting Room to protect all these steps in your process, many websites prefer to focus on the final bottleneck at the end.
We can even take information regarding product choices from your systems as you pass your users into the Virtual Waiting Room, and pass it back to you as they come back - it's easy.
Not sure what's right for you? Ask us for a performance review of your website and we'll be happy to nail down any unknowns you may have.
Even with fast webservers, your order processing systems and database functions will slow with too many people. Queue-Fair protects your system and your visitors.
You can brand your Queue Pages using any pictures, assets, text or style you like.
There's nothing more damaging to your brand than a crashed site or error message or - even worse - Refresh, Refresh, Refresh when people are trying to buy. Uniquely in the industry, Queue-Fair allows you complete control over your Virtual Waiting Room, with full access to the HTML of your queue pages, so you can change them however you like.
We'll provide you with example text that you can edit as you choose, and you also control colours, styling imaging and backgrounds - all without sacrificing performance in any way.
Because you have control of the HTML of pages, anything that can be shown on a web page can be shown to visitors while they queue. Want to add a video? It's easy. A slideshow of your products? That's a snap too. The only limit on what you can show on your your Queue Pages is your imagination.
While your users are in the Virtual Waiting Room this is also a marketing opportunity for you; you can even push live messages if you like. Increase customer faith and satisfaction in your brand with Queue-Fair, rather than damage your reputation with a website crash.
Our Virtual Waiting Room works brilliantly on all screen formats. Want a notification sent to your users when they reach the front of the queue? No problem! Want callers to your phone line to have their place saved online? We can even do that too.
Your visitors have the comfort of knowing their place in the queue has been saved no matter what device they are using, and even if they switch devices while in the Virtual Waiting Room. If the wait is going to be long why not tell them to relax, have a cup of tea and come back when they are ready to be served; no-one loses their place in a Queue-Fair queue.
Automatically show queue pages customised for each visitor or tailored to the specific pages on your site they wish to see.
Run an event website and don't want the hassle of creating a new queue for every new event? No problem! Queue-Fair can protect your whole site and all the events you run with a global queue, and automatically brand and style the Queue Pages your visitors see on-the-fly for each of your separate events - without you having to lift a finger, or even use an API. Change the wording, style, content, images or any other aspect of your Queue Pages to match the specific event or page on your website that each individual visitor wants to reach. It's completely automatic! Each visitor sees a page that is tailored to the event they were trying to access when they were sent to queue - or even provide each visitor with individual content that's personalised to them - it's all up to you!
Our unique dynamic system is effortless, automatic and you don't even need to login to the Portal when you create a new event - just add your event to your site as you would normally do. Contact us to find out more about this unique hassle-eliminating, time-saving feature, only from Queue-Fair.
Queue-Fair does not operate as a DNS or reverse proxy. Rather, think of it as a page from us inserted between two pages from you. We have the most flexible implementation in the business and are happy to customise for you - our entire product suite is the result of many years of such interactions.
Whether you are protecting a whole site or a single page, an app screen or an NFT drop, Queue-Fair has the solution that is right for you.
You can send visitors into a Queue-Fair Virtual Waiting Room with a direct link, or with client-side javascript (which many customers find the simplest way), with Network-Edge code at your CDN provider, or with server-side code.
We have pre-written adapters for every major web programming language and app development platform, but if you find your tech isn't listed just ask and we'll make one for you.
We are also happy to do remote installations for you if you like, as part of your Free Trial.
Unlike some providers who use queue servers that are not under their direct control, we use dedicated queue VMs with a High Availability Active/Active architecture - so traffic for your account is distributed across several live machines. Virtual machines in our core database clusters are also Active/Active Master/Master replicated. This means we can perform maintenance on any machine in our solution without dropping a single request or record, including our database machines. Our patented method also means machines in our database clusters are never under load no matter how busy your queue may get. We don't believe any other Virtual Waiting Room provider can say the same.
Our maximally efficient patented queue process means we can queue millions of people at the same time on each Queue Server in each Queue Server Cluster, and it's all protected by an ultra-high-availability world-wide distributed Google Cloud Load Balancer with Google Cloud Armour.
Queue pages, assets, settings and scripts - the browser files that make up your queue page display and integrate with your web pages - are served by Google CDN - fast, reliable and speedy from Google's Edge Network anywhere in the world. We've chosen a CDN method that does not require auto-scaling - it's unlimited hits all the time - so we instantly respond to massive increases in hits per minute. We tested this ourselves with an industry-standard load testing tool and couldn't so much as dent the performance even with millions of requests per minute and zero ramp-up time. If you would like to run your own load tests, let us know, and we'll set you up with a Free Trial.
All display assets are distributed worldwide within 30 seconds of being added in the Portal, so static content for your pages, your queue page layouts and queue settings for integration are always fresh and delivered instantly. It's all easily managed with the drag-and-drop File Manager in the Queue-Fair Portal, which handles CDN deployment for you automatically, securely and effortlessly.
With close to two decades in the business, we are also used to fulfilling the more stringent uptime and networking requirements of voice solutions, which are much higher than the standard normally required of websites and SaaS solutions. You should expect to find our service as reliable as Google.
Install Queue-Fair on your whole site by adding a single line of Adapter code to your website pages, or install a Server-Side Adapter on your website, or a Network-Edge Adapter at your CDN or cloud provider for the most secure queues in the business.
Once that's done, it's fire-and-forget technology - new queues are added, existing queues are reconfigured and Queue Pages are fully customised with our easy-to-use Queue-Fair Portal. There's a wealth of historical and real-time Queue statistics too.
Uniquely within the industry, we give you full access to the HTML code for the Page that is shown to your queued visitors, so you can make your pages look however you want, and say what you want them to say. You also get a hosted filespace for images and supporting files used by your Queue Pages, so people in the queue are never placing load on any of your servers, all managed online through the Portal with our handy File Manager.
Want to keep things simple? Each new Queue Page starts with our default HTML, which contains a logo, a favicon and recommended messaging - or you can Clone any page that you have already created. You can brand up quickly by simply replacing these assets with your own assets, and hey presto! It's your logo that's shown. Next set the colours and font for your Queue Page to match your site where indicated in the Portal Page Editor. Finally, and optionally, you can edit the page text to say whatever you want it to say; it's a snap! It's so easy and quick to do that we are also happy to do this for you as part of your Free Trial.
Use the Queue-Fair Portal to easily manage the Activation Rules that determine which pages on your site may present a Queue when things get busy - once the Adapter is added to your pages or webserver, you don't need to modify your code when your business needs change.
Running the same site with different brands, or need to queue in multiple languages? No problem - just add a Queue Page Variant and your visitors will see different visual treatments for the same queue. Pages can even be customised with personalised content dynamically on the fly with Queue-Fair too.
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Invented and patented in 2004, Queue-Fair is the original Virtual Waiting Room, providing online queue management for busy websites and apps.
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Part of the Orderly family of queue solutions - OrderlyQ - OrderlyStats - WeQ4U