Ars Technica

Challenges

Large, irregular fluctuations in traffic

Ars Technica 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, Ars Technica

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. Deft helped us design the right solution.”

Technical Director, Ars Technica

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, Deft 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, Deft’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 Deft’s engineers suggested it.”

Lead Developer, Ars Technica

Results

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

Uptime

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

Cost reduction

Ars Technica prioritized spending money efficiently, not just saving it:

“Since having Deft 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, Ars Technica

Support

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

“What I like about Deft’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 Deft.”

Technical Director, Ars Technica

Expertise

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

“If we get a notification from Deft 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, Ars Technica

Convenience & peace of mind

Day-to-day operations have improved greatly:

“Since we made the move to Deft, 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, Ars Technica

The road ahead

“Deft 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 Deft.”

Lead Developer, Ars Technica