Twenga’s Web Hosting Capability with LeaseWeb Grows from 100 to 300 Servers in 1 Year
LeaseWeb (www.leaseweb.com), one of Europe’s largest hosting providers, has supported the spectacular growth of its client Twenga. In the past year, Twenga has expanded its hosting capability from 100 to 300 servers.
This strong growth in server capability was driven by the success of Twenga’s 13 Web sites, including the UK, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Brazil, Russia, the United States and Australia. Twenga is a global price comparison and shopping search engine. The company was founded in 2006.
In March 2008, Twenga received about 11 million visits per month and indexed 30,000 e-retailers. One year later, by March 2009, these numbers had grown to 22 million visits and 60,000 e-retailers. Twenga’s product offering also grew significantly, from 70 million to more than 130 million products.
E-commerce Hosting
Twenga’s server expansion was designed primarily to meet the increasing demands of its crawler, the TwengaBot. This proprietary Web bot technology scans 200 millions Web pages every day. It uses some 200 out of Twenga’s 300 servers.
“In one year, the number of Web pages scanned by our crawler doubled from 100 million to 200 million,” explained Cédric Anès, Chief Technical Officer and co-founder of Twenga. “This rapid growth put very high demands on our server capability. We were able to rely on LeaseWeb’s large hosting capacity to scale up rapidly. LeaseWeb’s ability to add servers at any time was a crucial factor in our rapid growth.”
Hosting: the Solution
LeaseWeb delivers a dedicated, Linux-based hosting solution that uses LeaseWeb’s global hosting network (capacity: > 500 Gbps) to Twenga. The solution currently encompasses 300 servers, distributed by LeaseWeb over a series of 19 inch racks in CO2 neutral data center EvoSwitch (www.evoswitch.com). Twenga’s server infrastructure, as installed at LeaseWeb, includes crawler servers, search servers, web servers and database servers. The hosting solution also incorporates Cisco networking equipment, such as switches, firewalls and load balancers. The hosting solution was designed by Twenga’s engineers in collaboration with LeaseWeb’s engineers. The latter also provide 24x7 installation, management and knowledge-intensive support services.