The Daily Meal Reduces Hosting Costs by 400% with Infrastructure Optimization
The Daily Meal, one of the largest food websites in the U.S., reduced hosting costs by 400% through performance refactoring and infrastructure optimization. With 30 to 50 million monthly pageviews and over 1.7 million recipes, the site required improvements in speed, uptime, and security. Over a five-year period, a development team implemented key optimizations, including migrating the website from a custom AWS-based platform to Pantheon, a hosting solution tailored for Drupal and WordPress.
Caching strategies and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) enhanced site performance, while a disaster recovery platform was set up on AWS to ensure resilience in case of hosting failures. Files were moved to a dedicated server using the open-source application Thumbor to optimize asset management and avoid the high costs of off-the-shelf solutions. Advertisement display and loading were also refined by selecting the most efficient platforms.
These improvements enhanced cost efficiency, reducing the need for extensive development resources, and significantly boosted website performance, with HTML content load times improving from 50% to 80%, completing in 0.5 seconds or less, and full page loads increasing from 20% to 60% finishing in under seven seconds. The project, published by .wrk, highlights the impact of Drupal-based optimization in maintaining large-scale digital platforms.
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