Bleacher Report Improves Performance and Reliability

About Bleacher Report

Bleacher Report (often abbreviated as B/R) is a global digital destination for millennial sports fans creating and collaborating on content at the intersection of sports and culture.

How did it start?

The story begins with a good dream, an angry clock, and a cup of coffee. Ben had pager duty, and the site wasn’t working. Let’s go back to the beginning.

Bleacher Report is the second biggest sports platform in the world and quickly grew to that size by offering sports fans something that no one else did: personalization and rapid content production, while following local to international sports. Most early users accessed the site through a computer or from newsletters that would, in turn, lead them back to the site.

In general, it was a passive model. We had to go to the site to get the information. Since most pages were static, they could cache them for performance. Spikes were relatively gentle, even when news broke.

Mobile changes the rules of the game

Almost overnight, that landscape changed. When the iPhone exploded, companies quickly developed applications (apps) that transformed the way customers interact with the web. Suddenly, when news broke, push notifications or emails would send everyone to their favorite sports site at once. Spikes were instant and violently sharp.

It’s hard to express just how much impact this kind of change could have. Say a famous star like Kevin Durant, one of the most famous basketball players in the world, suddenly gets traded to the San Francisco area. The news site would push out 10 million notifications. If only 5% clicked, they’d have an instant spike of a half million users, and the site couldn’t handle it.

With a mobile phone in everyone’s pocket, the definition of what was major news changed too. Now, the end of a good game or an upset became major news. While this shift certainly wasn’t ...