A Big Milestone in Scalability

We’ve learned a lot of lessons in scalability over the last few weeks.

The initial idea for BizGreet™ arose from the need for our own Marketing Agency to have a faster yet more personal way to get in front of potential clients. Cold calling is tedious and intrusive, and email simply doesn’t cut the mustard. Thus BizGreet™ was initially designed as a small Business-to-Business contact accelerator that allowed us to open doors with new clients through personalized web video.

Yesterday we launched our first political BizGreet™ campaign for an upcoming election in Texas to an initial audience of 181,000! It still spots the personal touch and ability to reach out and connect with your audience, but it is a far cry from the 100-200 contact range we had initially planned, or even the 1000-2000 range that we tackled just a few months ago.

Over the last weeks and months we’ve worked on a number of changes that have helped us to quickly scale the application to this new level and beyond. Luckily as a web application we get a lot of help from the cloud on this:

• To keep the load on the web front end low, the footprint of a typical visit page loaded from the web server is around 11 kb. It’s pretty much only the HTML itself.  This allows our servers to handle hundreds or thousands of requests without starting to choke.
• To be prepared for traffic spikes we have the ability to quickly bring additional server instances online that can handle any excess load on the web front end.
• All digital assets like images and videos are stored on the highly-scalable, reliable, safe, and redundant Amazon Simple Storage Service.
• To ensure that all site content is displayed quickly and the videos buffer fast enough in the player, these digital assets are then enabled in Amazon’s CloudFront network, which caches these files in numerous edge servers strategically placed across the nation and the world.
• We’ve also made some code changes that led to significant performance and handling improvements on working with such a large number of leads – for example, our first version of the BizGreet™ dashboard provided easy access for browsing and editing the contact and URL lists, but it was optimized for a few hundred leads. When dealing with 180,000 contacts the tools have to be able to sort, filter, and search lists to quickly find and edit what you’re looking for. Now they do.

All that said, it’s a constant work in progress and we’re working hard every day to make BizGreet as good as it can be. Right now we’re pretty excited about BizGreet’s™ performance in delivering personalized video to hundreds of thousands of recipients – now we’re looking ahead to figure out what it takes to move to the next milestone.

On an entirely separate note: If you haven’t become a BizGreet fan on facebook, join us now! We’re closing in on breaking the first 100 fans and need your help.

Thanks!