SparkPeople: Lightening the Load
Dieting is big business—from $60 billion to $80 billion annually according to industry estimates, and that’s only in the United States. Online dieting Web site SparkPeople.com doesn’t cost dieters a penny—it makes its money through advertising—and it gives people what they need to help them diet: a community of support, rich interactive personalized programs and tracking tools, and helpful tips on changing behavior to achieve a healthier lifestyle.
The Cincinnati, Ohio-based company is giving advertisers what they want as well: a sticky site that attracts dieters and holds their interest. SparkPeople’s statistics are impressive: Monthly, its Web site attracts 5 million unique visitors, 15 million visits and approximately 110 million page views. And traffic is growing by 25 percent yearly. Even more impressive is the 50 to 100 percent spike during the peak season, which is January, when people make their New Year’s resolutions. The 10-person IT team spends most the year strategizing for the peak season. Each year presents the biggest scalability challenge yet.
Throughout the year, we look for bottlenecks anywhere along the system, whether it be I/O, CPU, memory bottlenecks or network bottlenecks,” says Josh Knepfe, CTO of SparkPeople, Inc. “And we try to work them out before the spike. If we’re down and our customer is trying to come to us, it’s very easy for them to go somewhere else. We try to have 99.99 percent availability at all times to help keep our customers happy and page views high. Dell helps us achieve that. We can’t afford to lose page views and the advertising revenue that we get from them.”
Read the full SparkPeople: Lightening the Load Case Study.
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SparkPeople: Lightening the Load
Dieting is big business—from $60 billion to $80 billion annually according to industry estimates, and that’s only in the United States. Online dieting Web site SparkPeople.com doesn’t cost dieters a penny—it makes its money through advertising—and it gives people what they need to help them diet: a community of support, rich interactive personalized programs and tracking tools, and helpful tips on changing behavior to achieve a healthier lifestyle.
The Cincinnati, Ohio-based company is giving advertisers what they want as well: a sticky site that attracts dieters and holds their interest. SparkPeople’s statistics are impressive: Monthly, its Web site attracts 5 million unique visitors, 15 million visits and approximately 110 million page views. And traffic is growing by 25 percent yearly. Even more impressive is the 50 to 100 percent spike during the peak season, which is January, when people make their New Year’s resolutions. The 10-person IT team spends most the year strategizing for the peak season. Each year presents the biggest scalability challenge yet.
Throughout the year, we look for bottlenecks anywhere along the system, whether it be I/O, CPU, memory bottlenecks or network bottlenecks,” says Josh Knepfe, CTO of SparkPeople, Inc. “And we try to work them out before the spike. If we’re down and our customer is trying to come to us, it’s very easy for them to go somewhere else. We try to have 99.99 percent availability at all times to help keep our customers happy and page views high. Dell helps us achieve that. We can’t afford to lose page views and the advertising revenue that we get from them.”
Read the full SparkPeople: Lightening the Load Case Study.
