Wedding blog scales effortlessly with national TV coverage

How we kept our wedding website online during a television appearance

  • Profile
    StyleMePretty.com

    Industry:
    Wedding resources

    Member since:
    June 2011

    Monthly traffic:
    8.5 million monthly page views

    Platform:
    WordPress

    Servers:
    2 dedicated servers, 3 additional virtual hosts in production and 3 more in development, running Apache and node.js.

Background

StyleMePretty.com is a style-savvy wedding resource devoted to the modern bride. We cover everything from gorgeous real weddings to up-and-coming vendors to seasoned pros in the invitation, floral, fashion and photography industries.

Launched in February of 2007, StyleMePretty.com has become a mainstay in the wedding industry. With nods in nearly every major bridal magazine, including Real Simple Weddings, Martha Stewart Weddings and Modern Bride, StyleMePretty.com is quickly becoming one of the most read wedding resources on the web.

StyleMePretty.com currently sees over 8.5 million monthly page views, 1.5 million monthly RSS views and 490,000 monthly visitors.

Business challenge

In June 2011, StyleMePretty.com was preparing for a feature on a national TV program. We were very concerned that the website wouldn’t scale. A co-worker suggested installing CloudFlare, and after looking into it we decided to activate it on our site to help offload the traffic that was inevitable during and after our national TV coverage. We enabled CloudFlare 12 hours before going on TV.

CloudFlare’s impact

CloudFlare was instrumental in offloading the five times increased traffic we experienced. CloudFlare automatically cached all the static images on our website, so our server didn’t have to serve them. CloudFlare saved us 80% of requests to our server, which amounted to 152 million saved requests during this high traffic time. With CloudFlare handling the increased traffic and offloading the load to our server, our website stayed online, running smoothly during and after the TV segment.

Traffic spike to StyleMePretty.com before, during and after our TV appearance

Financially, the real win for us has been using CloudFlare rather than a more expensive CDN. CloudFlare caches our most-requested images and serves them for $20 per month through their Pro plan. This is a substantial savings over the next option, which goes straight to our bottom-line.

The user interface is simple and you get insight into the traffic coming to your website as well as how much you’re saving on bandwidth. Overall, using CloudFlare has been a really nice experience.