Edge Caching Case Study

Case Study: Sphere Related Content Widget

Sphere uses Hostway's content delivery network to speed page loading times, increase availability and serve a global audience with its Related Content Widget.

The Company

Sphere is a start-up company with a passion for conversational media. With its origins in blog indexing, Sphere has quickly grown as a provider of key traffic generators for mainstream media sites.

Sphere's flagship product, the Related Content Widget, acts as a bridge between mainstream media and conversational media, like blogs. The widget drives traffic back and forth among hundreds of thousands of blogs and many of the highest traffic news and media sites on the Web.

The Challenge

The widget generates contextually relevant links for each page on which it's placed and serves them up on demand. This ever-growing collection of pages generates increasing volumes of traffic for Sphere.

“Our Sphere Related Content Widget became incredibly popular in a very short period of time. It was being used on more than one billion page views per month, and that number was growing rapidly," said Martin Remy, Sphere's chief technology officer. "We needed a cost-effective way to quickly scale the widget's delivery.”

The widget was already being used on major media Web sites such as The New York Times and popular blogs like GigaOm.

To continue to grow the widget, Remy began searching for a content delivery network (CDN) that would speed the widget's delivery and improve its availability to readers all over the world.

Sphere needed a solution that could:

Offer faster page loading times
Increase the widget's availability
Serve a worldwide audience

Sphere has a dedicated hosting plan with Hostway Corporation, and Remy consulted the company for a solution.

The Solution

"As soon as Martin contacted us with his problem, we knew our Edge Caching Content Delivery Network was the perfect solution to address each of his three concerns," said John Manganaro, Product Manager at Hostway.

For Edge Caching, Hostway established a network of clustered servers in its ultra-secure, high-tech data centers across the globe. These servers, called “cache servers”, store copies of original content for quick retrieval and delivery to the end user.

Hostway's Edge Caching can:

Speed up page load times — Using its network of servers, Edge Caching identifies the fastest route and quickly delivers the data to the end user. Shorter page load times lead to a better user experience and reduce click-aways.
Increase availability — Because Edge Caching servers are spread out geographically, the network is less vulnerable to outages and disasters that can shut down a single location.
Serve users across the globe — Edge Caching's CDN servers are strategically deployed in Hostway's data centers on four continents, including: North America, Europe, Asia and Australia.

“The blogosphere is a global phenomenon. To ensure fast load times for users all over the world, we needed a global solution like the one Hostway offered,” said Remy.

After reviewing the Edge Caching CDN tool and its simple approach to managing content, Remy knew he had found the right solution.

The SiteControl management feature allows Sphere to quickly and easily update its content on the network and access usage statistics, Web analytics and other helpful tools.

“When designing the Edge Caching SiteControl management tool, we kept everything simple and easy to understand. The customer should be able to get in, do what needs to be done and get out without weaving through a maze,” Manganaro said.

The Conclusion

After implementing Edge Caching, Sphere noticed a considerable improvement in the page download speed and now enjoys the added security of high availability. Edge Caching CDN fortifies an already strong product and ensures that the Sphere Related Content Widget performs to the company's high expectations.

“The Hostway Edge Caching CDN solution allowed us to grow very fast and in a cost-effective way, giving us the performance and manageability we need. We’re very happy with this solution, and so are the billions of users who rely on us every month to connect their content,” concluded Remy.