- In peak situations customers will be sent to your branded waiting room with an HTTP 302 redirect
- While in the waiting room visitors are on Queue-it's infrastructure & see clear wait information
- Once it's their turn they're flowed back to your site with another HTTP 302 redirect & have a secure token confirming they've been through the queue
- Cover payment gateways, logins, "Add to Cart" requests & more with a simple actions & triggers framework
- Get 24/7 protection for unexpected traffic peaks
- Send visitors to the waiting room only when traffic exceeds the capacity of your systems
- Sell through product more efficiently by avoiding overselling, crashes, payment errors & cancelling bot orders post-sale
- Save technical resources by using a bolt-on tool to manage traffic instead of re-architecting systems for extreme load
- Capitalize on your brand moments by delivering a fair & informed experience that builds loyalty & trust
- Show customers transparent wait info like place in line or estimated wait time & share messages in real time
- Allocate product fairly with mechanisms like first-in-first-out access or “live raffle” randomization
- Fully brand your waiting room & use it as a marketing asset to cross-sell products, capture emails, or drive social media engagement
- Prevent crashes from bot-driven spikes & give other bot tools more time to identify malicious behavior
- Add a security checkpoint to your flow so you can slow down bots & run security checks like Proof-of-Work challenges or data center hard blocking
- Proactively verify trusted visitors by tying waiting room access to a unique identifier like email address, user ID, or promo code
37%
average reported savings on server scaling with Queue-it in place
48%
average reduction in staff needed on-call during sales, freeing them to drive added value for your business
85%
of Queue-it customers sell through product more efficiently by avoiding overselling, crashing, payment errors & cancelling bot orders post-sale
* Based on 214 survey responses from Queue-it customers (2023 & 2024). See the results.
"The peace of mind we get from using Queue-it is outstanding. The best thing is feeling relaxed, not having to worry, knowing that everything will be okay. The virtual waiting room reacts to and controls our traffic instantaneously, and if we need to make any changes, we can easily do it on the spot with the API or the dashboard.”
THIBAUD SIMOND, INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGER
“Queue-it’s a great bolt-on piece of infrastructure, completely dynamic to our needs. The virtual waiting room made much more sense than re-architecting our systems to try to deal with the insanity of product drops that take place a few times a year.”
TRISTAN WATSON, ENGINEERING MANAGER
“I can count on one hand the number of times in my career I've implemented a new technology and it exceeded my expectations. Queue-it is one of those times, both in how easy it is to implement, and in how well it works.”
DENIS GOULET, NEW HAMPSHIRE STATE CIO
Queue-it redirects online visitors to a waiting room that enables a controlled flow of traffic to your site or app. In high-demand situations, customers are redirected to a customizable waiting room on Queue-it's infrastructure using an HTTP 302 redirect. They're then flowed back to the website or app at a controlled rate using another HTTP 302 redirect and get a secure token confirming they've passed through the waiting room.
Queue-it can be used:
- As a safety net that only activates when a traffic threshold is reached
- For scheduled sales where you anticipate a traffic spike
- For exclusive or early access sales where you want to gate access to a page
Scaling your systems is a good idea, but it’s often not enough to ensure systems perform no matter the demand. Relying on autoscaling alone comes with these challenges:
- It’s expensive to scale servers & databases to many multiples of baseload capacity
- It’s risky because some systems may not scale (e.g. legacy backend, 3rd party systems) and visitor traffic and behavior is hard to predict
- It's reactive, so if traffic spikes in seconds and it takes minutes to spin up servers, that's too little too late
- It’s labor intensive because it requires expertise and active monitoring to ensure it’s meeting the demand
Using Queue-it to control traffic flow can help you:
- Reduce costs of scaling servers and databases
- Remove the risk of systems breaking because a key bottleneck can’t scale
- Minimize work needed to keep systems online 24/7
Load balancers and virtual waiting rooms solve different problems. In high-demand scenarios, one doesn’t replace the other.
A load balancer is stateless and distributes requests across servers. It scales well, but it doesn’t control traffic volume. It passes requests through—even if your backend or third-party services can’t handle the load. If capacity is exceeded, users hit HTTP 429 errors, timeouts, or degraded performance.
Queue-it’s virtual waiting room controls the flow of incoming traffic, ensuring your systems don’t exceed capacity. During spikes, it offloads visitors to Queue-it’s infrastructure and lets them through in a controlled, fair order while providing estimated wait times and a branded experience.
In short, the virtual waiting room protects your stack during peak situations, and load balancers help scale what traffic is allowed through. Most resilient systems use both.
When visitors are placed in the waiting room depends on how you set up Queue-it.
First, you can choose whether the waiting room should be “Always Visible” or “Visible at Peak”. If you choose “Visible at Peak”, the waiting room will activate only when traffic inflow (in visitors per minute) exceeds the threshold you've set.
Second, you choose the parts of the user flow that Queue-it covers. This could be your entire website, a landing page, the login page, or a dynamic request like when customers click “Add to Cart”. This way, you queue visitors only at the stage in the user journey that needs protection, while visitors who haven’t taken the protected action can browse the site normally.
You can trigger the waiting room based on 6 parameters, including:
- Request URL
- Request Body
- User Agent
- Cookie
- HTTP Header
- JavaScript
If you had unlimited inventory and your website was infinitely scalable, you wouldn’t. But otherwise, uncontrolled traffic risks your customer experience and bottom line.
Higher demand than inventory makes it hard to allocate product fairly, reward loyal customers, and keep bots and resellers at bay. And higher traffic than site capacity can overheat hard-to-scale bottlenecks, crash or slow your site, and ruin your team's productivity.
For most business and customers, an informed wait to buy a popular product or service is better than a slowed/crashed site where customers can’t buy.
And it’s not just the length of the wait that matters—it’s how people feel while they wait. Advanced waiting rooms harness queue psychology to improve the experience and turn waiting into anticipation and progress.
You choose the traffic outflow level, measured in visitors per minute, and can adjust it up or down on-the-fly using Queue-it's API or web-based admin platform.
The best way to determine your outflow is to use a load test. If you haven't run a load test, Queue-it's peak traffic experts bring years of expertise in identifying system bottlenecks, understanding how many visitors your infrastructure can handle, and recommending a starting outflow level that's optimal for your site's performance.
You can integrate Queue-it with a client-side, server-side, edge, or mobile SDK connector. Queue-it offers over 25 connectors and dedicated support staff for implementation.
Yes, Queue-it can be used on mobile devices and integrated into iOS, Android, Cordova, or React Native app frameworks. Visitors on a desktop can even transfer their position in queue to their mobile device if they need to queue on the go.
Because Queue-it is not implemented as a reverse proxy, you don’t expose any sensitive data. Our interaction with your system is as if the visitor entered the URL, then the Queue-it URL in the browser, waited, and entered the URL for your website again. No Queue-it end-point has payload or session data from the protected site, including credit card and/or personally identifiable information.
Queue-it is ISO-27001 certified and compliant with GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, and the PCI DSS frameworks. You can choose whether your servers reside in the European Union, the United States, Brazil, or Japan, based on your requirements.
You can show the waiting room in 50+ languages to tailor the experience to your markets.
The waiting room is a lightweight solution built specifically to avoid bottlenecks and handle extreme load, meaning holding users is less resource-intensive than on typical sites or apps.
Queue-it is cloud hosted, with several dedicated global AWS data centers, enabling high levels of scalability and eliminating single points of failure. Queue-it processes an average of 100 million visitors daily.