How Dainik Bhaskar addressed application bottlenecks to handle peak website load of more than 24 million visitors

A 1-second delay in page load time yields: 11% fewer page views, 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, and 7% loss in conversions, according to a report by Aberdeen Group. Another report by Akamai found that 47% of people expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less while 40% will abandon a web page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Certainly, website speed matters for every firm - and more so, for media firms. In an industry like media, people are constantly logged in to catch the latest updates. Today, all the major media conglomerates are focused on handling traffic spikes issues to deliver better user experience, more engagement, and even higher search rankings.

Media giant, Dainik Bhaskar faced a similar challenge. The firm's network traffic would typically spike between 30-70% whenever significant news announcements were made. The group hosting 15 websites wanted to improve its website performance during peak traffic when many users were trying to access a single website at the same time. The firm wanted the network to be highly available and secure.

Dainik Bhaskar was using a basic load balancer Fortinet firewall with limited features and scalability. Owing to these limited features, the group always had issues of application bottlenecks and at the same time the pages were taking long to load during peak times. There was an utter need for better scalability and management of traffic spikes.

The media firm scouted for options, and after evaluation selected A10 Networks' ADC solution. After installation of the A10 ADC solution, Dainik Bhaskar’s main concern – the application performance improved appreciably and was much fast and responsive. The solution also ensured low website latency even when application traffic spiked. “We receive around 24 million unique visitors on our websites and were facing problems on slow application performance. The deployment of the solution has not only saved us a lot of time, but also helped us in ensuring uninterrupted service along with improved performance,” says Arokia Nathan, Head of Technology, Dainik Bhaskar.

The technology also enabled Dainik Bhaskar to save on CAPEX costs due to lower power consumption. The solution also maximized the websites’ uptime by detecting local and remote outages with highly available applications and datacenters, advanced server load balancing and global server load balancing (GSLB). The deployed solution also has built-in intelligence which means that it will perform periodic health checks and send alerts to the network administrator when servers go down.