Smart Content Delivery™ Supports "Excite Blog" That Boasts 100 Million Monthly Page Views
Excite Japan, the provider of the successful "Excite blog" was facing an issue created by the increasing load on its Web servers as a result of the rapid growth.
Blog users were rapidly increasing thanks to the service's popular content. This was creating a heavy demand on the sites infrastructure.
| Excite Japan (hereinafter "Excite"), a company that offers a wide variety of services including its portal site and entertainment services such as Web magazines, online games and music download services, as well as EC and broadband connectivity services, launched its Excite blog service in February 2004. On the leading edge of the blog, it began offering its beta version service and transitioned to the production service in July 2004. |
In Japan, as many as 150 services are offered with reference to "blog". This is a popular type of service that allows customers to quickly and easily set up a web site. Among these offerings, Excite blog continues to be very successful thanks to its feature that enables the users to post large, high resolution image files. Free standard service users can upload up to 30 MB of images per site while users who have bought its upgraded optional service can upload an unlimited volume of image data. "Because of this feature, a number of so-called 'photologs,' whose major content is pictures that have been taken with a digital camera, are opened on our blog site," says Mr. Yosuke Yoshizaki, Producer, Media Business Planning Dept., Media Headquarters.
The appreciation by the users is demonstrated by the rapid increase in the number of users. In February 2005, one year after the service launch, the number of sites was around 160,000. In May, the number was boosted to 250,000. The page view count exceeded 100 million per month.
Mr. Yosuke Yoshizaki, Producer, Media Business Planning Dept., Media Headquarters |
Meanwhile, as the number of users grew, the increasing load on its Web servers became a matter of concern.
"To maintain Excite blog's unique 'easy, fine and agile' quality, we barely managed to prevent slow response times by installing additional servers," recalls Mr. Yoshizaki. Despite these efforts, the servers failed to handle some of the requests successfully at midnight and during other heavy traffic hours. Users began to complain that the site was slow to update or that the web page did not display quickly enough.
The company felt that there was a limit both in terms of cost and maintenance workload as long as they stuck to the idea of installing their own additional equipment. They decided to look at Content Delivery Networks (CDN).
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