But this is no easy task for one of its clients, Mega Millions, because the lottery’s website can get millions of visits in a short period leading up to and immediately following the twice-weekly drawings.
Visitors are “coming to find out if they need to go to work tomorrow,” Mezera said.
Credit: JIM NOELKER
Credit: JIM NOELKER
The next Mega Millions drawing will take place at 11 p.m. tonight, and if a ticket out there has all six numbers correct, the winner will get what is the fifth-largest jackpot in the history of the game.
Drawings happen on Tuesday and Friday nights.
Mega Millions is a multi-state jackpot game that consists of drawing five white balls from a set that are imprinted with the numbers one to 70.
A sixth ball, which is gold, also is drawn from a set that are numbered one to 25.
The Mega Millions lottery has been around for more than 20 years, and excitement about the game intensifies when the jackpot gets close to the $1 billion mark.
Mezera said Mega Millions’ website starts to see very high traffic volumes when the jackpot exceeds $800 million.
“The bigger the jackpot, the more phenomenal the traffic,” he said. “It’s pretty interesting to see how the size of the jackpot really changes user behavior.”
The Mega Millions jackpot has surpassed $1 billion four times in the history of the game, including once already this year and once in 2022 and 2021.
DataYard runs the server infrastructure that publicizes the winning numbers, the previous winning numbers and other information about the lottery game.
“We have nothing to do with the selection numbers,” Mezera said. “People ask me all the time, ‘Can you tell me the winning numbers?’ No, no I can’t.”
Web traffic on the Mega Millions website is pretty consistent most of the time, but on the nights of the drawings, the number of visitors surges between 10:50 p.m. and 11:10 p.m.
The second-highest jackpot ever was won in January of this year ($1.3 billion).
On the night of that drawing, the Mega Millions website had 3.7 million visitors in a roughly 10-minute span of time, Mezera said. Mezera said his team spends a lot of time preparing for those short windows of high traffic that he says can feel like a frenzied Black Friday.
DataYard staff will be working from about 9 p.m. until midnight tonight to make sure things go smoothly online. The company expected to have about 2,000 visitors per second to the Mega Millions website on Tuesday night at the peak times.
Large volumes of web traffic all at once can cause websites to crash or freeze.
Ticketmaster’s website crashed when Taylor Swift tickets went on sale, and Walmart’s website went down several years ago when Playstation 5 systems first went on sale.
DataYard has nearly 400 customers. It has hosted Mega Millions since 2018, and the Ohio Lottery has been a client since 2011.
Mega Millions had its first drawing about 21 years ago, and now its tickets are sold in 45 states.
The odds of winning the Mega Millions jackpot are one in about 302.6 million.
Credit: Bill Lackey
Credit: Bill Lackey
To put that into perspective, people have a much higher chance of being struck by lightning in any given year (1 in 1.2 million odds).
The last time that a Mega Millions jackpot-winning ticket was sold in Ohio was in December 2019.
Before that, a $142 million jackpot was won in May 2018 by the ABC XYZ Trust with a ticket that was purchased at a gas station in Moraine.
A group in Piqua won a $207 million jackpot in 2008, and a Dayton ticket won a $21 million jackpot in 2004.
DataYard was created in 1995, but it was Donet back then. The company name changed in 2012.
Top Mega Millions jackpots
$1.537 billion, won on 10/23/2018, ticket bought in South Carolina
$1.348 billion, won on 1/13/2023, ticket bought in Maine
$1.337 billion, won on 7/29/2022, ticket bought in Illinois
$1.050 billion, won 1/22/2021, ticket bought in Michigan
$910 million (estimated), drawing tonight on 7/28/2023
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