Case Study | The Onion.com’s Site Downtime Minimized Significantly
The Onion Maximizes Advertising Inventory by Improving Site Performance 50% and Eliminating Site Downtime
Satirical news site The Onion.com serves award-winning articles, videos, and 40-million page views to more than 8 million unique visitors each month, making it the most popular news organization in its class. When, in 2006, fast growth in subscribers and site visits began to strain The Onion’s infrastructure, the site experienced significant and highly unpredictable downtime periods. To shore up its website delivery infrastructure or risk losing the customer loyalty—and ad revenue—it had worked so hard to build, The Onion began leveraging the services of two content delivery networks (CDNs). When the primary CDN caused a site outage, The Onion knew that CDNetworks, as its secondary CDN provider, could satisfy all its functional requirements, having witnessed the CDN’s performance for whole site delivery. Since switching to CDNetworks, The Onion has experienced 100% website uptime and 50% performance gains, including average page download time of 75 milliseconds.
In this case study we will discuss more in depth the ways in which CDNetworks helped The Onion.com maintain its laser focus on site uptime and performance.
Some key topics discussed in this case study include:
- Obstacles The Onion.com faced with its site infrastructure
- Core requirements for choosing a new primary CDN
- Growing video-based revenue
From the case study:
“’Being fast and reliable is critical, and CDNetworks helps us predictably deliver more than 30 million page views per month, which in turn allows us to increase our inventory for advertising revenue,’ says Michael Greer, The Onion’s VP of Product. ‘But it’s also all the little things that make a difference. CDNetworks proactively raises potential site issues. We interface with senior engineers who are true subject matter experts. The company is constantly innovating technology and adding features. And its instant self-provisioning tool has made our lives so much easier.’”
Read and download the complete study here: “The Onion Maximizes Advertising Inventory by Improving Site Performance 50% and Eliminating Site Downtime.”
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