Online Media Company

Challenges

Large, irregular fluctuations in traffic

This major technology news site needed to handle an extremely large amount of traffic fluctuating in demand. During certain live blogging events, the site can grow from 2 million pageviews to 16 million pageviews within two hours. Being able to scale to match spiking demand was critical.

Potential Revenue Loss

Advertisers pay this popular tech news site per impression, so any downtime would mean significant revenue losses. They lose money every second ads don’t display.

“If we go down, our users don’t come back. They’d be poached by the competition.”

Lead Developer

Deployment

In 2012, the news site set out to completely redesign its website. The project began with a redesign of its IT infrastructure. Their number one priority was developing a more scalable, robust, and highly available architecture.

“We knew we wanted — needed — to do a high-availability infrastructure, but had no idea how to approach it. SCTG helped us design the right solution.”

Technical Director

High availability solution

Together, we determined that a completely managed, high-availability architecture was the best approach.

Each component of their Private Cloud and managed Network Connectivity solution was configured for high availability. A high-availability architecture ensures the news site stays up 24×7 regardless of equipment failure or maintenance, which is critical for a modern news resource. Should any active component fail, the system automatically enables running-but-inactive spares and the site continues to serve readers.

Once a failed component is replaced or brought online again, SCTG reincorporates it into the live environment and reestablishes the automatic failover capability. Our Managed Services team handles it proactively without interruption.

“Instead of pushing us toward the most expensive equipment, SCTG’s team was tremendously helpful with arriving at a solution at the cost that we wanted. We hadn’t even considered managed network storage for our VMs until SCTG’s engineers suggested it.”

Lead Developer

Results

The news site continues to increase visitors and pageviews by more than 20% each year.

Uptime

The infrastructure designed, deployed, and maintained by SCTG has not caused a single minute of downtime.

Cost reduction

The news site prioritized spending money efficiently, not just saving it:

“Since having SCTG managing our infrastructure, we’ve without a doubt saved time and money. We have cost predictability because they own and manage everything, which our finance team really appreciates.”

Lead Developer

Support

The successful online media company remains very pleased with their relationship with SCTG:

“What I like about SCTG’s support is that it has a systematic way of handling things without the cold, robotic approach of your standard ticketing system. I send a request and I’m in their ticketing system, but they add an additional back-and-forth responsiveness anyway. It’s immediate, it’s personal, it’s intelligent, and it’s my favorite part about SCTG.”

Technical Director

Expertise

The news site trusts SCTG’s team to act as an extension of their own:

“If we get a notification from SCTG that says ‘we’re looking into a network issue,’ rest assured it’s an actual network engineer working on it who knows a lot more about the problem than we do.”

Lead Developer

Convenience & peace of mind

Day-to-day operations have improved greatly:

“Since we made the move to SCTG, we can focus on the programming of our site and user experience. We’re not stressed about infrastructure because it’s running so well.”

Lead Developer

The road ahead

“SCTG helped us design our infrastructure for growth, but when we get to the point where we have to plan another expansion, we’re doing it with SCTG.”

Lead Developer