With its web traffic spiraling upward every day, HolidayIQ.com was finding itself in a fix on how to handle it. Here is how it resolved the problem with Akamai’s Aqua Web Experience solution
By Jasmine Desai
The months of December and May always posed a problem for HolidayIQ.com, when traffic on the website traffic would reach its peak. A holiday information portal enabling holidaymakers and tourists to plan and share their experiences online, HolidayIQ.com is accessed by about
5 million Indian travelers every month for planning their trips. In 2012, it generated business opportunities worth Rs 2,500 crore with partner hotels and travel agents.
It was in September 2012 that the organization started feeling an urgent need to address the issue of traffic surge. The traffic was growing 15-20% month on month. Presently, the volume of data generated on a daily basis reaches up to 16-18 GB. Says Amit Shrivastava, Senior Vice President, HolidayIQ.com, “We started looking for ADC (Application Delivery Controller) solution to help us offload some of our static media content delivery system, to scale up our user experience performance.” However, from a usability point of view and performance of the site, they thought it best to go with a CDN (Content Delivery Network), because of its much broader server network and local presence. HolidayIQ being based in Bangalore, wanted to have local servers to boost user performance in terms of speedy response time. HolidayIQ.com had three to four Linux-based servers which catered to their users. These servers were hosted at Reliance data centers in Bangalore. Presently, the organization has shifted to a Netmagic data center.
HolidayIQ.com is a very content heavy site and around 80-85% of data is user generated content. They wanted to offload all captive content based on user feedback onto the CDN and had only one specific criteria while scouting for a vendor. Mentions Shrivastava, “We wanted a vendor whose solution fitted Indian market perfectly. In terms of pure content delivery network, we did consider data centers like AWS. But Akamai had lot of Indian presence and local servers.” Thus, began the implementation process for Akamai Aqua Web Experience Solution. Aqua Web Experience solution is designed to address the challenges of end users accessing online portals from across various devices. It is built over the Akamai Intelligent platform. This is a globally distributed platform of more than 120,000 servers, spread across 1,100 networks in about 80 different countries.
For an enhanced user experience
The Akamai Intelligent platform was able to ensure that 90% of HolidayIQ.com’s customer site traffic was delivered from the Akamai edge servers, which resulted in cost savings as far as origin bandwidth was concerned. There has been an origin bandwidth offload of 93%. In addition, this channeling of traffic resulted in 100% site availability with no downtime. In comparison, if each request had to go through the customer’s origin this would have amounted to additional investment for bandwidth. The data is with HolidayIQ.com. Akamai’s solution helps in rendering data. HolidayIQ has set of media servers that Akamai has been given access to. the CDN is integrated in the solution itself. It stores, caches and renders the data and then gives it to users. At each user module, the experience can be catered to much faster because of this solution.
The implementation process took around two months. Mentions Shrivastava, “The major task for us during implementation was aligning our media access layer to render all content delivery files like images, videos etc. and tweak it, for which we had to test at the Akamai module server.” If you look at any of images, they come from a certain domain which is a dedicated URL that is kept aside for the purpose. All these static files have to be released to these domains. Even the rendering part had to come from these domains. All of traffic rendering is taken care by the CDN systems. The site can now scale up from the existing infrastructure without any hassle. The implementation went very smoothly and due to it, users can now view the site much faster, in spite of larger page-sizes. It is a relief for the organization that for around next one year, they do not have make any additions to their existing infrastructure. Post-implementation, the website saw an increase in performance with site traffic having doubled within three months of implementation.
Speaking on the implementation, Shrivastava says, “The most exciting thing about this solution is the whole image rendering system. Images usually took a lot of bandwidth, which is not the case now. In that particular area, we have seen the solution working really well. Unless there is a local CDN server, the process would take lot of time.”
Every organization or website have their own typical problems. Since HolidayIQ.com is a content heavy site, majority of the content is offloaded to these servers. There is always preliminary precautions that everyone takes before implementing such critical solutions. Shelling out some advice on it mentions Shrivastava, “Organizations looking at adopting such solutions should carefully evaluate the kind of solutions they need. Organizations should identify two or three critical problems and then look for an infrastructure solution which could be CDN, more servers, more CPU etc.” Some of these content delivery solutions might not be able to gel well with the static content, where there is lot of streaming on a day-today basis. HolidayIQ.com is a static site so this particular solution works very well for them. But for e-commerce sites where is lot of inventory and transactions happening on a real-time basis, more advanced and dynamic solutions are a better fit. These solutions will not only render, but also process the request.
HolidayIQ.com is gearing up for more ambitious plans to build up on the Aqua Web Experience Solution. Next on the agenda is the plan to leverage the ubiquitous mobile platform. Its user base in mobile is escalating consistently with 35% of traffic coming from the mobile platform. So it is looking at a solution from the mobile content delivery network perspective as it has to be even faster than the existing one.
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