Real-Time Bidding at scale: why engineering for consistency beats elasticity

You’ve built an adtech platform that scales. Tick. Your cloud dashboards look healthy, with autoscaling events behaving as expected. Tick. And yet, you’re still wondering whether your infrastructure will hold under real, sustained auction pressure. Or if your execution will remain steady when queries per second (QPS) stays high for hours. Because in real-time bidding, constant behavior is the end goal – not reactive scaling.

It is what successful real-time bidding (RTB) platforms are built upon - sustained high concurrency. Auction deadlines mean late responses – often to the millisecond – are dismissed, and latency variance quickly loses out to consistent setups that are ready to respond to every ad impression. It’s a challenge faced by many, as Founder and CEO of programmatic advertising technology company GeoSpot Media explains:

“Our previous solutions struggled with maintaining consistent performance at scale, especially during peak demand. As QPS climbs, every millisecond counts. Even slight latency can mean missed bids and lost revenue.”

What sustained RTB load looks like

Sustained RTB load doesn’t look like the traffic patterns most cloud-native systems were originally designed around. It isn’t a clean spike followed by quiet periods. Instead, it’s a high baseline of requests that rarely drops, with additional surges layered on top as campaigns launch, regions wake up, or new partners come online.

When QPS stays elevated for hours, the challenge becomes maintaining consistent execution under constant pressure – a reality that the public cloud simply wasn’t designed for.

This is where consistent behaviour starts to matter more than raw scale. Average latency figures may still look healthy, but averages rarely tell the whole story. It only takes small spikes in latency under system strain for bids to arrive too late and disappear from the auction entirely. At scale, those missed opportunities accumulate quickly.

What makes this harder to detect is that the signals are subtle rather than dramatic. Rising variance in response times, intermittent bidder slowdowns, or unpredictable performance during otherwise stable traffic periods are all signs that your platform is technically scaling, but not always behaving consistently.

GoNet – an adtech platform that designs and delivers programmatic campaigns for advertisers – found that by using bare metal infrastructure from servers.com they could deliver their requirements consistently:

“As a company building high-load products that handle millions of requests per second, we primarily use bare metal servers,” said Mike Halchevsky, Chief Product Officer at GoNET. “servers.com provides us with all the necessary infrastructure and client services quickly.”

It’s knowing when to move from scaling for capacity to engineering for consistency that makes the difference. Only then will you be able to achieve consistent bidding performance that protects revenue as auction volume grows. It’s what servers.com Enterprise Bare Metal (EBM) is designed for: creating a dependable and cost-efficient baseline that is tailored specifically to your needs.

With custom RAM, storage and network configurations, your sustained load will be optimized to your requirements so that performance remains stable under pressure, latency stays predictable, and growth does not erode the margins you’ve worked to build.

Achieving consistency

Under sustained auction load, performance metrics that would otherwise appear stable can drift into unpredictable response times, complex scaling rules and latency variations. The fact is that many environments are designed to scale capacity in bursts, not to guarantee consistency over time.

The question then shifts from how well your platform scales, to how consistently it behaves when pressure never really drops. And that’s where infrastructure design starts to matter - particularly in three key areas that directly shape bidding performance under sustained load.

Deterministic compute for bidder paths

The often-overlooked reality of shared environments is that workloads compete for resources. For adtech, this means bidders may be competing with unrelated processes on the same hardware before they can respond within auction deadlines. This introduces latency variability that only becomes visible under sustained load, and when every response has a deadline, that variability quickly translates into missed opportunities.

servers.com’s EBM removes that uncertainty. By providing sole ownership over compute resources, EBM eliminates the risk of noisy neighbours, offering high, dedicated performance with no resource contention.

Flexibility meets consistency

For many adtech platforms, the challenge is not choosing between cloud and dedicated infrastructure but finding a way to balance the elasticity of one with the dependable performance of the other. Before working with servers.com, GeoSpot Media had worked with both cloud-based and dedicated server providers. As Agarwal explains:

“Cloud solutions provided flexibility but lacked the consistent low-latency performance we required at scale. On the other hand, the dedicated server providers we worked with offered performance, but were less flexible in terms of rapid deployment and geographic coverage.”

This is where servers.com bare metal solves both of these issues - EBM is often deployed alongside Scalable Bare Metal (SBM), combining dedicated, deterministic performance with cloud elasticity.

SBM enables bare metal servers to be deployed within minutes on an hourly billing model, making it easy to introduce additional capacity when demand increases without adding opaque pricing mechanics or shared-resource constraints. Built on dedicated, pre-defined hardware configurations, SBM lets adtech teams expand by adding like-for-like nodes, maintaining steady performance profiles and clear cost expectations as they scale.

With this setup, you are able to maintain the low-latency consistency needed for revenue-critical bidding paths while still handling demand peaks without operational friction.

For platforms like GeoSpot Media, a hybrid environment provides them with infrastructure that behaves predictably under sustained auction load, without sacrificing the agility required to grow and adapt as traffic patterns grew.

“servers.com’s infrastructure supports our demand for consistent uptime and fast response times, enabling us to handle double the previous QPS without any latency issues.”

Stable performance during sustained high QPS

When high QPS loads persist for hours, differences between nodes, network paths or provisioning timings can create subtle performance drifts, even when systems appear to be scaling correctly on paper.

EBM reduces variability between workloads, while SBM allows for additional capacity to be brought online without introducing unpredictable execution behaviour. If you were to find that near-instant scalability with hyperscale cloud, you would still have the risks that come with resource contention. SBM gives you that scalability, without any of the side effects. 

For high-load platforms like GoNET, consistency under pressure is essential. As Halchevsky explains, “the reliability and stability of our infrastructure is paramount,” particularly when serving high request volumes where even small delays can compound into measurable performance impact.

When infrastructure behaviour becomes predictable

What these examples highlight is that sustained auction performance is about ensuring that infrastructure behaves the same way when demand rises as it does during normal operation.

Deterministic compute, flexibility without compromise, and stable execution under high QPS combine to create an environment where engineering teams can focus on optimisation and innovation, rather than compensating for infrastructure variability. And when execution stays consistent, bidding performance becomes something you can rely on.

The results that GeoSpot Media found once they migrated their infrastructure to servers.com speaks for themselves:

servers.com builds dedicated infrastructure designed specifically for the sustained demands of modern adtech platforms. Through our EBM, SBM and AIC product suite, teams gain the operational clarity needed to maintain competitive bidding strategies as scale increases.

If you’re evaluating how your platform will perform under sustained auction pressure, our specialists can help you explore the infrastructure approaches that best fit your workload and growth plans. Visit our adtech page, or get in touch.