Envy Labs

FreeLayouts Site Optimization

Free Layouts is website where you can browse, preview, and download free templates - or designs - for your website, blog, or content management systems.

We were approached by Free Layouts to re-write the application, migrating it from PHP to Ruby on Rails. At the same time, we were also tasked with improving the site's ability to handle a large amount of traffic (or scale). We accomplished this by utilizing:

• Integration with Amazon S3
  To save on server bandwidth and cut their hosting costs, we reworked the application to allow us to serve all template downloads directly from Amazon S3. This way, Free Layouts was able to offload some of their bandwidth and storage costs to Amazon, which was much less expensive.
• Website caching
  We added a robust caching strategy to the Free Layouts site. This allowed the service to handle a far greater number of users, while ensuring a very high quality of service for each visitor.
• Load testing
  To ensure our caching strategy would handle large volumes of visitors, we used several load testing tools to verify it. It's simple to say it, but it's far more useful to prove it. Through our testing, we were able to prove that the new site could handle as many as 95 million hits per day. That's a lot of traffic!