It's Both!

The purpose of CrowdHandler is to hold excessive traffic in a virtual waiting room, providing access to your website or application via an online queue, preventing website crashes, and providing a fair experience to your customers.

 

Originally we referred to CrowdHandler as a Virtual Waiting Room, because North Americans tend to talk about waiting in line, rather than queueing. However, in recent years queuing, or the concept of a virtual queue has become a frequently used term within the software industry, and now Online Queue Systems are becoming a readily understood software category.


Online only!

CrowdHandler is not intended to manage physical queues or waiting rooms, whether that be in a doctor's surgery or a festival line. CrowdHandler has been used many times to queue users who would otherwise overload online systems for medical appointments or ticketing sites for festivals, but in each case the resource being protected is online, either a website or an application. We're here to prevent software crashes, not physical jams.
 

There are other software products that help automate the process of managing physical queues and medical waiting rooms. These are typically referred to as queue management systems and, virtual waiting rooms respectively. If you are looking for a product to manage physical queues or a real waiting room -- that's not us, sorry!

There are also software products that provide queuing services at an infrastructure level, to help developers build robots and scalable system architectures. This is typically known as message queueing and is used in products such as Rabbit MQ or AWS Simple Queue Service. That's not us either! Although we do offer a robust API, and help with scalability problems.