Aug 01, 2023
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The Daily Meal: Hosting & Performance Refactoring
Completed

The Daily Meal: Hosting & Performance Refactoring

$25,000+
2-3 months
United States
2-5
Service categories
Service Lines
Web Development

Challenge

The Daily Meal website has around 30-50M pageviews, 2.5M unique users on average per month, more than 250GB of image assets and more than 1.7M recipes which makes it very high-loaded. To provide the company with effective page load, maximum uptime and security, we came up with a range of changes which led to a complete refactoring.

Solution

We completed the following tasks: – concentrated our focus on the proper use of caching, starting from web framework caches and leading up to CDNs. – to increase the robustness of the website we have built a disaster recovery platform on AWS that replicates the site infrastructure – moved assets to a separate specified server that only works for providing assets – tuned the way ads load and appear on the site, investigated existing ad platforms to choose the fastest and the most efficient options and are constantly monitoring and supporting them.

Results

As a result of the work we achieved the following outcomes: – monthly hosting charge has been decreased by 4 times (400%) – the development process has become cheaper and more robust because specialised hosting is now partially responsible for maintaining deployment tools – the overall website performance has also increased from 50% to 80% of page load (only HTML) finished in 0.5 seconds or less, and from 20% to 60% of full page loads (including scripts, ads, assets, and so on) finished in 7 seconds or less.