An auction in the Cloud raised almost 4.5 million euros

No, the auctioned item was not a painting by some famous artist. Nor was the auction hosted by world-renowned auction house Christie’s. This record was set during an online auction held via a Flemish site hosted by Combell, and the auctioned items were… pigeons!

The highest bids went to a first-class pigeon named Bolt, that was sold to Gao Fuxin, a Chinese businessman, for the hefty amount of 310,000 euros. Never before has there been a pigeon sold for over a quarter of a million. Together with Bolt, another 530 pigeons bred by Leo Heremans (Vorselaar, Belgium) were sold during the 2-day auction on Pigeon Paradise. The breeder was forced to sell his kit of pigeons due to allergies he developed. The cooing birds of the “duivenfluisteraar” (Heremans’s nickname) brought in an impressive total of 4,346,500 euros.

This is a new record for the auction site, which has been hosted by Combell for many years. The auction went very well, despite the massive worldwide interest. “When traffic peaked, we had over 100 bids per minute and everything went smoothly on our Cloud infrastructure hosted by Combell”, says Pigeon Paradise CIO Erwin De Vylder. “Combell showed flexibility by temporarily increasing our Cloud capacity, which was definitely a good thing considering the traffic peaks and the number of visited pages”, De Vylder adds.