720 Strategies

720 Blog

720 Embraces Cloud Computing

Mon, February 1st, 2010 by Tom Cochran | 0 comments

Over the weekend, we completed the last steps of our three-month server upgrade process. Countless hours of planning and late nights migrating websites will pay off as we significantly expand our hosting capabilities. The new environment will help us realize our goal of increasing the scalability of our servers by leveraging leading-edge technologies like cloud computing.

The old infrastructure was brought online in 2006, successfully supporting all of our clients during two electoral campaign cycles and numerous legislative agendas in between. We have steadily grown our clients’ hosted websites over these past few years and we needed to scale our operations up to meet increasing demand for technology support.

Planning for this upgrade began in the summer, as we identified an interruption-free migration strategy from our old server environment to the new one. We are continuing a four-year relationship with our data center partner Rackspace, to provide the highest-caliber hosting environment for all of our clients, augmenting our offering with a new, state-of-the-art content delivery network (CDN).

The content delivery network is the most exciting enhancement being made available to all clients. Encompass720 (720’s content management system) has been improved to take advantage of new cloud computing technologies, providing unlimited file storage and bandwidth. By leveraging the on-demand scalability and elasticity of cloud computing, our client websites will no longer be bound by the physical disk storage capacity of server hard drives.

Files and images uploaded to the new cloud-based CDN are delivered at blazing speeds by a geographically distributed set of content servers (i.e., a user in San Francisco will load the cached image from a server in California whereas a user in Chicago will load the image from a server located nearby in Illinois). During our planning phase, we were seeing performance increases of 80 to 90 percent for page load times. For our clients, this means vastly improved website response times when they’re experiencing significant traffic spikes.

Our technology team is very excited about our improved hosting infrastructure and we look forward to continuing our unparalleled service and support for all our clients. We strive to provide a worry-free website hosting experience through 24x7x365 proactive monitoring and support. This next phase for our infrastructure illustrates our dedication to unparalleled technical support and how 720’s technology will continue to meet and exceed the demands of high-profile campaigns.

Comments

There are no comments