Efty has made its domain name landing pages a lot faster

Efty’s co-founder Lionel Petitiaux talked about how scaling the platform was the hardest thing to do.

“Building a product that people love isn’t easy, there’s no doubt about that. It takes most start-ups a long time and a lot of money and even then, most of them fail to ever hit product/market fit.”

“What we didn’t know was that the hardest job was yet to come: scaling the platform.”

“When we had a couple hundred users, quickly building new features was simple. So was testing product changes, or launching a third-party integration. We just did it.”

But now Efty has thousands of users, all using different registrars, email providers, and has more than 1 million domains under management in almost every TLD imaginable that all impact the way Efty functions.

During a major outage recently the Efty main website was down for a few hours. Also For-Sale landing pages started to take longer and longer to load.

Thousands of users, managing 1 million+ domains, resulted in hundreds of request per second flooding the Efty name servers. The infrastructure wasn’t ready just yet to accommodate this large amount of traffic and DNS requests. At this point, during peak hours, For-Sale landing pages sometimes took up to 8 seconds to load.

So Efty together with the technical support team at IBM and an outside consultancy firm worked to implement massive changes to the infrastructure. After analyzing the type of traffic, optimizing database design, balancing the load over different servers in different locations, optimizing DNS configuration and minimizing the page size of the landing pages Efty started to see results.

After a 3-day development sprint average load times dropped to a steady 2.5 seconds. Some additional tweaking throughout the next days helped Efty reduce loading times and reach an average of 1.5 seconds (measured over time, from 85 different geographical locations using 3 different templates).

“While things like these tie up cash and keep us from taking on our product development roadmap as aggressively as I’d like to, it is important we’re making these long-term investments to ensure Efty remains the reliable, fast and stable platform where you want to manage and sell your domain names.”

(Efty is a sponsor on OnlineDomain.com)