Excite Japan ("Excite"), offers a wide variety of services including its portal site and entertainment services such as Web magazines, online games and music download services, as well e-commerce and broadband connectivity.
It launched a beta version of its Excite blog service in February 2004 and moved to full production service in July 2004. In February 2005, one year after the service launch, the number of site visitors was around 160,000. In May, the number had grown to 250,000. The page view count exceeded 100 million per month.
The Excite blog continues to be very successful thanks to a feature that enables the users to post large, high resolution image files. Free standard service users can upload up to 30 MB of images per site while users who have bought its upgraded optional service can upload an unlimited volume of image data.
"Because of this feature, a number of so-called 'photoblogs,' whose major content is pictures that have been taken with a digital camera, are opened on our blog site," says Mr. Yosuke Yoshizaki, Producer, Media Business Planning Dept., Media Headquarters.
Excite’s particular problem was that it had become so successful that blog users were creating a heavy demand on the site’s infrastructure.
"To maintain Excite blog's unique 'easy, fine and agile' quality, we barely managed to prevent slow response times by installing additional servers," recalls Mr. Yoshizaki. Despite these efforts, the servers failed to handle some of the requests successfully at midnight and during other heavy traffic hours. Users began to complain that the site was slow to update or that the web page did not display quickly enough.
The company felt that there was a limit both in terms of cost and maintenance workload as long as they continued to install their own additional equipment. They decided to look at Content Delivery Networks (CDN).
Excite tested CDN services from four providers and they chose NTT Communications' Smart Content Delivery (SCD) service because it performed the best in their testing.
NTT Communications' Smart Content Delivery service delivers content very efficiently by using state of the art cache servers. These servers are installed on NTT Communications' world-class Global IP Network and delivers content data on behalf of the content provider's web servers (origin servers). A high level of performance is achieved through the cache servers being deployed on the Tier 1 IP backbone of NTT Communications’ network, which provides direct connections with major ISPs both in and outside of Japan.
By using Smart Content Delivery, content providers are able to improve performance across their entire web site without installing additional systems or acquiring additional internet connectivity. They only have to manage content delivery from the web server to the cache servers. In addition, content providers can respond to increased demand on their site in a flexible manner. This enables them to provide quicker response time to their end users.
Considering the benefits and the results of the test Excite made the decision to use SCD. "We measured the load on the web servers and found out that when SCD was used, the load was reduced to a half to one third of those of the others. It was a very good result," says Mr. Fu Jin Hao, Manager, Infrastructure Dept. Furthermore, the load dropped to around one fifth compared with the scenario in which in-house servers were used.
After SCD was implemented complaints from users went away. Hardware costs were reduced and new application opportunities were opened up.
Excite began to use SCD in April 2005. Since then no additional equipment has been needed by Excite. SCD was implemented by Excite making simple, small changes in the DNS settings.
The positive effects of this implementation were quickly realised. In addition to drastically reducing the number of complaints about slow processing, both at the customer service contact and on the blog site, the company won the highest rating again on a blog performance evaluation site.
Excite has been able to reduce both capital investment and the resources that are required for system operation. This has resulted in overall savings for them.
Excite has also begun to use SCD on some of its portal sites with the aim of reaping additional benefits from the service. "Speaking of Excite blog and other services of ours, one of the appealing points for our users is that a lot of pages are decorated with pictures," says Mr. Fu in anticipation. "As we underline this feature, the application of SCD will surely be extended."