Rapid growth required this client to address site stability and uptime requirements to a nationwide base of users and advertisers.
The Challenge:
Founded by college students with limited technical experience, this online entertainment company had reached nearly a million daily users with no sign of slowing down and was struggling with the challenges that come with rapid growth. They were faced with the daunting task of providing uptime requirements to a nationwide base of users while meeting service level agreements with advertisers. The website had to be fast, reliable and always available online.
The rapid growth that comes with success, however, was wreaking havoc on their business. The existing infrastructure couldn’t keep up with the increasing number of visitors, downloads and data storage demands, and advertisers were becoming frustrated with the site’s poor performance. Frequent outages were costing the company thousands of dollars per minute in downtime.
As a startup, they didn’t have a lot of working capital to spend on implementing solutions to these problems, either. They needed an integrated team specializing in all aspects of technology – from networking to OS, applications and traffic – but without the astronomical price tag that usually comes with a large, cross-functional IT service company.
What We Did:
VIMRO offered not only system engineering, hardware and outage support, but the trusted infrastructure required to sustain their growing company. With VIMRO as a single point of contact, the leadership team received the personalized attention they needed. Rather than jumping through hoops to get problems addressed, they were able to pick up the phone and quickly get the problem solved by someone they already had a working relationship with.
VIMRO also provided vendor agnostic solutions, ensuring the team had access to a diverse portfolio of open source products and unbiased evaluations so they could choose the options that fit their needs best. Additionally, the VIMRO team:
- Trained the client application development team in techniques for high-availability, scalable software architecture and worked to implement numerous other improvements within that area
- Improved site scalability dramatically with holistic changes encompassing both hardware and software
- Achieved desired scalability by adding resources to allow management of additional traffic in a linear fashion, so that hardware was added logically following user growth
- Applied redundant and efficient load balancing for web traffic
- Provided cost efficient system architecture based on Linux and Solaris operating systems
- Virtualized a large segment of the infrastructure using Solaris and VMWare to maximize hardware utilization and reduce costs
- Designed and implemented content distribution networks for serving ads, images and videos
- Implemented MySQL database replication and clustering
- Extensively tuned applications and restructured them to allow for scalability
Results:
After experimenting with multiple architectures and testing what worked, while also keeping costs to a minimum, the company was able to achieve better stability and attract an even larger visitor and user base. While letting VIMRO take the reigns on the tech side of things, the great minds behind the company were able to focus their time and energy on their core competencies, like marketing, content and growth.
In the end, VIMRO helped grow this client from a four-man operation in a dorm room to a multi-million dollar company with a solid, stable foundation that could easily scale.
The client’s goal of acquisition was eventually realized when they were purchased by a large web property holding company.
