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Why use Queue-Fair on your site, app or NFT drop?

Keep your website open, regardless of demand

Your biggest sales are your highest stakes events. You need flawless performance, not a crashed site.


Queue-Fair allows you to safely manage surplus traffic that would otherwise slow down or even crash your website, without spending on additional servers that you don't need the rest of the time, or pushing up gas fees on crypto networks.

The Original Source of Online Fairness

Placing visitors in our patented first-come first-served Virtual Waiting Room ensures your website performs just when you need it most, and stops your website crashing. You're looking at the most powerful Virtual Waiting Room platform in the world.


Our customers tell us that the honesty and fairness we put in to our original invention shines in every aspect of what we do, from our documentation and Portal interface to our onboarding process and commitment to supporting you, and from the moment you contact us, we will do our level best to ensure that this is your experience of Queue-Fair too.

Convert more Visitors to Buyers with Queue-Fair

Queue-Fair helps you reach the buyers that would be lost to website crashes or slow responses when things get busy without our system in place. Remember, the average visitor will leave your crashed site if they don't see a response in just three seconds (source: Google) so just because your website is not completely down or you're not receiving error messages, this doesn't mean you aren't losing sales - indeed it could be happening right now and you might not even know - but we can find out for you; just contact us and ask for a performance audit.

keyboard with shopping trolleys
keyboard with shopping trolleys

People Who Queue Spend More

In excess of 20% more in each basket according to our customers.

As well as serving customers who would otherwise be lost, customers who arrive through a Queue-Fair Virtual Waiting Room are keener to buy, resulting in a higher conversion rate when the queue is active, and more than 20% more product added to each shopping basket, according to our customers. They also get to see how popular you are! Having an active queue discreetly tells visitors that what you have to offer is valuable to many other people too, increasing the value of your offering.

Queue-Fair is also the most accurate Queue AI in the business, which means the people in your queue won't have to wait so long compared with Virtual Waiting Rooms from other providers. Shorter waits mean higher retention and more sales.

Reseller opportunity! Do you have customers, contacts or clients that need our service? Great! Let's help them together! Contact us to benefit from our reseller and referral programmes.

The highest rated Virtual Waiting Room on G2 and SourceForge
We have the perfect 5.0 / 5 star score!

Our Happy Clients Say

 
the power to to protect your website from traffic surges
the power to to protect your website from traffic surges

Efficient and Green

The right kind of power. Reduce emissions and wasted server costs with our energy saving solution.

The most powerful Virtual Waiting Room platform in the world

Queue-Fair is, quite simply, the most powerful queue system on earth. Take a look at the chart below, which shows an example run of our three custom-built stress test machines against the ultra-efficient Queue-Fair virtual waiting room system.

The yellow line shows the number of new visitors joining the queue each minute. This ramps up as we turn on each stress tester to a whopping 2 Million visitors joining in a single minute at peak-join at 19:50. The visitors that have joined the queue are still there, and at peak-queue at 20:00, Queue-Fair is fairly queueing over 21 Million simultaneous visitors (pink line), providing updated estimated waits and progress information to every single one. That's over ten times more visitors than the largest queue ever reported by any of our competitors.

the power to to protect your website from traffic surges
the power to to protect your website from traffic surges

We know this chart may not look sexy to everyone

If you are into ultra-high-performance computing, saving the environment, or saving money for your business - then trust us, it's gorgeous!

What's truly astonishing is that this queue of over 20 million visitors is being handled by just one of our ultra-efficient queue servers - and even at the peak load of 21 million visitors in the queue at the same time, that server is only using half its processor capacity. The Queue Server in question is a Virtual Machine sitting in the Google Cloud, which means we can leverage the full power of Google's Edge CDN for super fast response times for page loads too. What's even more astounding is that this particular Virtual Machine is not even the most powerful VM we have - that one is over seven times faster than this. Furthermore, if someone were to ask us to queue more than 300 million visitors at the same time, we can just add more queue servers - our solution has the power of scalability too.

Just think about that for a moment

Queue-Fair can hold everyone in the world who has an internet connection in the same queue at the same time with just 12 Google Cloud VMs and still have room to spare. That's actually amazing! That's real power, right there.

19.4 million queue joins per minute
19.4 million queue joins per minute

Wow!

That's over 300,000 people joining the queue per second!

That's not the limit of the Queue-Fair system's power. Here's a stress run showing how fast visitors can join the queue. You can see for yourself that this same ultra-efficient economical Queue Server comfortably handles almost 20 million visitors joining the queue in a single minute - that's well in excess of 300,000 joins per second - with a single VM and without breaking a sweat. CPU for CPU, it's the fastest queue server on the planet - and if you are curious why we are so much faster than the competition keep reading - the answer is below.

What's more, this kind of power is the good, clever, efficient, optimised kind, not the bad, power hungry, wasteful, resource-destroying, greenhouse-gas-emitting throw-too-many-servers-at-it kind adopted by some other providers.

What does all this power mean for you? You would be forgiven for thinking "Well, I'm never going to need to queue 20 million people, so this means nothing to me" - but nothing could be further from the truth. You see, because our power is the smart kind of power, the result of careful load testing, skillful operating system tuning, judicious platform selection and decades of optimisation experience, this is the good kind of power that benefits all our customers as well as the environment.

For example, our scalable ultra-efficient system is the reason why all our customer accounts enjoy unlimited queue size - including our Free Tier accounts. Unlike other providers, we don't impose any limit on the number of people you can queue at any one time. Rather, our award-winning Virtual Waiting Room fairly queues as many as you need automatically, and you never have to worry about exceeding any size limit, or triggering a higher price band because you're busier than expected.

Save
       money
Save
       money

Clever Coding Delivers Savings

We pass the efficiency savings on to all our customers.

More importantly, it's the also the fact that our solution is so wonderfully efficient, so gracefully fast, so effortlessly speedy, that means we can handle your queue - any queue - with less compute expenditure than any other provider. Doing more with less means that we can provide our Virtual Waiting Room service to you at a lower cost than any other provider. Much, much lower. And, you won't ever need to worry about our Cloud-powered High Availability Active / Active service running out of oomph or your visitors seeing a crashed site.

Save
       money
Save
       money

25% Discount Guarantee

Against any comparable surge protection quote, so you can be sure our rates are the best on the market.

Queue-Fair is better value

All this efficiency means we can provide our Virtual Waiting Room service to any customer, large or small, at the lowest cost in the business. That's how we are able to guarantee at least 25% off any comparable surge protection quote - and customers who have switched to us often find they save very much more than that.

Queue-Fair is owned by the original inventor of the Virtual Waiting Room for busy websites, not a venture capitalist or equity fund. We're not under pressure to charge excessively high prices or hire huge numbers of staff just to look like a big business. You don't need a team of hundreds to run the perfect Virtual Waiting Room - just people that are really good.

Our focus is on providing an honest, fair service at a reasonable price, to help as many people as we can with the highest quality Virtual Waiting Room service on the market, at the lowest possible cost. That's our mission. We're socially responsible, providing green and sustainable tech and the companies in our group do pay Corporation Tax.

Our solution is less costly to operate and we pass these savings on to you, which is why we are happy to offer you a 25% discount over any competitor quote.

Find out how much you could save

Right Now

Queue-Fair: The power of flexibility

The power to save you money is not the only kind of power we have to offer. Uniquely in the industry, we give all our customers full access to the HTML behind the queue pages that their visitors see, and Edge CDN file space for assets on those pages - which means the entire queue experience is served away from your busy servers.

That means you have the power to make your queue pages look however you want them to look, and say whatever you want them to say, for a fully branded customer journey - and we'll help you get them just how you like, of course. Our customers always tell us our support is top notch - and you can see that in their own words in the testimonials you'll see throughout this site.

flexible online queues prevent crashed sites
flexible online queues prevent crashed sites

Flexible to suit your requirements

Take your business to new heights with our flexible solution.

While we're on the subject of power, Queue-Fair offers even more in terms of flexibility. For example, it's a snap to produce multiple variants of Queue Pages for different brands or languages, so people can be in the same queue, but have a different visual experience. Furthermore, once your Queue Page has been been created, it can even be customised on the fly automatically and dynamically as people enter the queue. Want some people to see a queue page with the name, branding and images of one event, and other people to see the name, branding and images of another? No problem. Want that done on-the-fly, without having to even edit the HTML, automatically customising itself for a new event or product on your site? Or even personalised content for that specific visitor? Uniquely, we can even do that too - ask us about our Dynamic Queue Page system.

Get all these benefits by adding just a single line of code to your pages (or no lines at all if you use Google Tag Manager) - or if you want Server-Side integration, or Network-Edge integration we have the power to do that for you too.

There's never been a better time to find out how the power of Queue-Fair can benefit your business. Why not start protecting your site and customers today - you can get our Free Tier service Right Now.

wooden trust with light bulb
wooden trust with light bulb

Trust Queue-Fair's Queue AI

Our clever code provides a superior, faster & safer visitor experience that is truly first-in, first-out.

Queue-Fair: The truly fair queue.

Visitors can see that they are being treated fairly in a Queue-Fair virtual waiting room. Fairness protects your brand and ensures visitors stay happy on the way to your site, with an estimated wait time and engaging animated display of progress through the queue, instead of the horror of hitting refresh repeatedly to try to get through to a crashed site.

Unlike queues from some unlicenced providers, people in the queue never form the impression that they have lost their place because the queue has moved backwards - Queue-Fair queues only move forward.

And also unlike some unlicenced providers, Queue-Fair really is first-come first-served.

For example, here's real data from Queue-it. You can see that people are passing straight to the site, without being queued, even while there are still people in the queue. That's not first-come, first-served. That's not fair.

Data from Queue-it
Data from Queue-it

What's wrong with this picture?

Quite a lot, actually!

  • Much Too Late!   Queue-it turns on minutes later than it's needed...

    On the left hand side of the chart we can see a serious problem. There's a spike of new visitors that exceeds the Desired Outflow at 01:43, but Queue-it is still Immediately Passing visitors - so the queue hasn't properly turned on and started showing queue pages - right up until 01:45. That's a whole two minutes. A lot can happen in two minutes of high load - like your server can crash!

  • Far Too Many!   60% too many people are let through before Queue-it turns on...

    That's not all that's wrong with this picture. The Actual Outflow at 01:44 is a whopping 60% higher than the Desired Outflow. Queue-it not only hasn't turned on, it's let far too many people through. 60% above-spec load can cause your server to crash or stop serving pages quickly or correctly, resulting in a crashed site. The Actual Outflow (light green) should never exceed the Desired Outflow - that's the whole point of having a Virtual Waiting Room in the first place.

  • Far Too Few!   Not enough people are let through while Queue-it is turned on...

    Even though there are more people arriving (Inflow, yellow), than the Desired Outflow (red), the Actual Outflow (light green) is well below the Desired Outflow - as much as 22% below at 01:51, for example. The Desired Outflow line should match the Actual Outflow line exactly. A Virtual Waiting Room that lets through too few people results longer waits, abandoning visitors and fewer sales - accuracy really matters. Can you afford a 22% drop in sales? Furthermore, small fluctuations in the number of visitors Passed each minute result in much larger fluctuations in the number of Concurrent Users on your site, resulting in your site crashing!

  • Not Fair!   Queue-it grants new visitors immediate access while others wait in line...

    You can see for yourself that the Inflow (yellow line) is greater than the Desired Outflow (red line) from 01:43 onwards. That means that all visitors arriving after 01:43 should be queued - but they're not! From 01:52 onwards as many as half the visitors are Immediately Passed without seeing a queue page at all (dark green line). That's not fair on the people who are still queueing. That's not first-in, first-out!

As you can see for yourself, Queue-it turns on too late , lets too many people through before it turns on, lets too few people through after it turns on, and doesn't even queue half of them.

Here's how this traffic should be handled:

Queue-Fair shows how it should be done.
Queue-Fair shows how it should be done.

Queue-Fair Works how it's supposed to Work

Because We Invented It.

While other providers use unfair systems, with Queue-Fair, The Honest Queue, the clue's in the name! As the inventor of the original fair queue for busy websites, we've done the clever programming that others haven't got quite right no matter how many thousands of hours they claim to have spent trying, so rather than your servers and customers suffer several minutes of over-spec load, our system turns on exactly when needed, actually does deliver visitors to your site at the rate you specify, in first come, first-served order, until the queue empties and turns off automatically, just as desired, and won't ever let too many people through, thus preventing a crashed site.

The Queue-Fair Queue AI is the best in the business at giving you the exact number of people you want, each and every minute, which is the only way to acheive perfectly stable, smooth server load on your site - meaning you can safely have a faster queue, shorter waits and more sales. Did we mention our pre-sale page works better too? You can leave a Queue-Fair pre-sale page up as long as you like - days, weeks, months - without impacting your sale.

Queue-Fair also offers advanced bot filters to prevent abuse and ensure that it's real people - your customers and fans - that are accessing your site, not bots taking advantage.

jenga toppling wood
jenga toppling wood

Safer For Your Systems

Built with website safety in mind since 2004

Queue-Fair is safer for your website

Using a Virtual Waiting Room means that visitors can use your site with optimum performance even when things are so busy that without Queue-Fair your website crashes.

The Queue-Fair Virtual Waiting Room also has technical advantages that make it safer than products from other providers.

Other providers use integrating pieces that introduce a dependency on their servers in order for visitors to see pages from your site - even when no queue is being shown.

That means when they have a server crash, your website crashes too.

Queue-Fair's Server-Side and Network-Edge Adapters have a Safe Mode that removes this dependency, as well as eliminating latency and the risk of losing visitors entirely due to slow connections or a crashed site.

What's more, our High Availability Active / Active architecture, with Master / Master database replication means there is no single point of failure anywhere in our Virtual Waiting Room system. We can perform maintenance on any machine in our solution without dropping a single request or database record, or affecting any customer accounts. All customer accounts, even for our smallest customers, are actively served by multiple Queue Servers with full redundancy, automatic crossover and automatic failure reporting and resolution built in.

Queue-Fair protects our planet as well as your website

Queue-Fair only shows queue pages when your traffic gets above the threshold that you specify. That means you don't need to leave servers running idle when things are less busy, so you can save hardware, hosting and energy costs, as well as reduce pollution, by using Queue-Fair, which is why Queue-Fair is green, sustainable tech.

What's more, Queue-Fair is the greenest queue-based Virtual Waiting Room out there. Other providers store queue positions in a database on their queue servers, which is massively wasteful as database lookups cost Order(Log(N)) computer operations, and energy. N is the number of people in the queue. This means their queue servers perform slower and slower, consuming more and more energy, as the queue expands in size. We can't see how that can possibly be sustainable.

Earth
Earth

Save resources, save the planet

Our maximally efficient process means you don't pay for servers you are not using.

Chart showing energy consumption
Chart showing energy consumption

Queue-Fair Consumes Less Energy

Queue-it's wasteful O(Log(N)) energy consumption for each request by each user queued is shown in red. Multiply this by the number of people queued and multiply again by the number of requests per minute that their browsers make and then again by the number of minutes queued to get the total energy consumed. That's a lot of energy!

Queue-Fair's efficient system, shown in green, uses the same low amount of energy per request whether it's 20 people in the queue or 20,000,000, as Queue-Fair doesn't need to do costly database lookups. As we've shown you, this makes our queue servers very much faster and more powerful, meaning we can handle more customers per server, with less energy consumed, and enqueue visitors faster when your product goes on sale - so no more hitting "refresh" for your visitors when you switch to Queue-Fair.

Our energy efficient solution minimises greenhouse gas emissions, another reason why Queue-Fair is always the ethical choice. Furthermore, our hosting on Google Cloud is already carbon neutral - and will soon be carbon free, according to Google's sustainability target. Any organisation that wants to be environmentally friendly or has a sustainability policy should therefore choose Queue-Fair.


Security
Security

The Most Secure Queues

Queue-Fair really is secure and unskippable, with a wealth of security features to protect your sale or NFT drop.

Queue-Fair is more secure

Some unlicensed providers advertise their queues as "secure" and "unskippable", but are they? No. While some have adopted the visitor-signing approach that we invented and patented to allow your webserver to check that a visitor really has been through the queue, in notable cases they have omitted to use visitor-specific data in the signature, meaning anyone can skip the queue.

This security vulnerability is easily exploited, without requiring technical skill. Here's how. Visitor A goes through the queue and gets a "secure" validation cookie, and posts the cookie name and value online. Visitor B copies the details and adds them as a new cookie in the browser, which is easy to do (Right Click, Inspect Element, Storage, Cookies, Right Click, Add New). Visitor B can then access any page on your "protected" site, because your webserver thinks Visitor B has been through the queue, even though Visitor B is cheating.

How to bypass Queue-it security
We easily bypassed Queue-it security by copying this cookie from someone who had already been passed by their queue servers. This vulnerability affects the Queue-it Javascript Connector and the Known User Connector that Queue-it advertises as "secure" and "unskippable".

Queue-Fair signs all visitors with code specific to the visitor's browser, which means copied credentials can be automatically detected and unfair access denied.

What's more, Queue-Fair offers a raft of anti-bot measures so you can ensure that it's genuine customers participating in your online event, not bots, scalpers or touts. We operate security checkpoints at both the Join and Pass stages of each visitor's journey through the queue, optionally using Captcha, Proof of Work - and you can limit by IP address too.

Need to restrict your sale to one purchase each? That's easy - we can automatically send people who have already made a purchase to the back of the queue if they try to buy again. Want to prevent people from obtaining multiple queue positions by using multiple devices or browsers? That's a snap with our Join Token feature too, so you really can ensure one order per customer - and one queue position per customer - with Queue-Fair.

Last and by no means least, unlike waiting rooms from other providers (Source: discountcodes.org.uk), visitors cannot bypass Queue-Fair security by pretending to be Google. And again unlike other online queue management systems from other providers, with Queue-Fair Google and other search engines can crawl your site unimpeded without compromising security.


Queue-Fair helps you avoid complaints.

A high profile crashed site can easily make the news, as well as create a flurry of negative tweets about your business. Queue-Fair helps you avoid the risk of your website crashing by providing a responsive page when your site is becoming too busy for your servers to handle. Queue-Fair holds the extra people away from your servers which can carry on processing orders with optimum speed and efficiency. Queue-Fair sends them back in first-come, first-served order at a rate your servers can handle - your website doesn't crash. Queue-Fair turns on automatically as soon as things get busy, so you can cope gracefully even when the spike in visitors is unexpected, for example from an influencer tweet, which would otherwise make your website crash.

Negative Feedback

Not all Virtual Waiting Rooms are equal in this regard. Some providers impose arbitrary time limits on when a visitor can pass through the front of the queue, for example. This results in people missing their turn, and tweets like this:

tweet from disappointed Queue-it user

Queue-Fair's default setting is of course "never miss a turn", so we don't have this problem, and your visitors won't be left "shaking their heads" in disappointment.


Queue-Fair is more ethical and fully lawful

Queue-Fair is provided by the original inventor and patent holder for the fair Virtual Waiting Room queue system for busy websites.

Our patent is granted and fully paid up in the UK, Ireland, France, Spain, Germany, The Netherlands, Canada, South Africa and Australia and is pending in India.

If you are using a competing Virtual Waiting Room product and want to find out where in the world your queue server is hosted, you can do that with this tool.

An organisation using a patented product without the patentee's permission faces reputational risk. Patent infringement is considered profoundly unethical behaviour, because people think of it as theft.

Risk

Disclaimer: All statements on this page are the opinion of The Fair Queue People Ltd. References to "infringement" on this page refer to the Process (Method) claim(s) of our granted patent(s). No statement on this page or site should be construed as intent or threat to sue any party other than Queue-it, who we are suing in the High Court. Affected by the issues raised on this page? Call our helpline +44 (0)333 5432 108 and ask about our 25% discount; we just want to help.


Fairly manage online sales, with any level of demand

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