India-Forums & Cyberax Give Feedback About Server Management By WIPL In India

Industry : Entertainment & Media

Profile

India-Forums.Com is a community that has built a site with over 514,000 members, 5 million monthly visits and 55 million page views per month.

Vijay Bhatter and team run Cyberax, an IT services company, which has helped fuel the growth and provide investment capital for India-Forums.

For those of you not familiar with online Indian forums and Indian television programs like Bollywood, India-Forums is one of the biggest and most popular Indian website and is currently in the top 5 High Traffic Indian Entertainment Portal. In terms of Alexa ranking (Amazon based company) India-Forums is at top 3,000 website in the world.

 The site's significant traction, huge fan-following, recent launches of related web portals and ambition to be the #1 website in the Indian entertainment world, is what that makes their case study the most interesting one.

Challenge

We were launched in December 2003.  Our goal was to bridge the gap between Indian television industry and its audience globally and bring them together to interact and take feedback.

The portal started as a blog on Jassi Jaissi Koi Nahi (adaptation of Betty La Fea which was adapted into Ugly Betty on American Television).  With a lack of a democratic forum, website, or community besides Yahoo groups at that time, India-Forums provided a platform for television viewers to voice their opinion.  As an open forum, members did not have to register in order to read updates or look through the portal and the comments posted by others.  It allowed people to adapt to the idea of a community based on their favorite Indian Television shows bringing fans together to ultimately discuss, debate and voice their opinions about the entertainment they consume on Indian Television.

As India-Forums grew at a rapid rate it faced IT infrastructure challenges, such as having the ability to scale website traffic and maintain speed for server-to-server communication. A solid network backbone and reliable support system were a must for our community. The ability of a hosting provider to provide this was crucial to India-Forums overall business growth.

Solution

Considering the volume of traffic, we needed someone who could not just maintain a single server but could handle number of connected servers with proper content distribution. The huge community meant that down times were an absolute No-No and the response time to critical issues (if any) was crucial. We started searching for setting up a server farm to replicate and distribute the content in between servers. In the year 2006 we moved to Dedicated Servers India WIPL's technical expertise. Their technical consultancy helped us create the desired server farm to manage and balance the load our portal was experiencing regularly. We were able to distribute our content across the servers and achieve the load balancing using various technologies, which were not only cost effective but also had and effect on our overall performance. We were adding hundreds of members every day and clearly our requirements were growing far more than what we had initially thought.

Benefit

We have achieved nearly 100 % uptime, redundant power supply and extremely great customer support with Server Management India. The scalability and support were never an issue. With the new technology we were able to scale up anytime we had a requirement and it immediately boosted our traffic.

Even though we later moved India-forums servers to our own facility, we are still a customer of WIPL and use their technical expertise for our various other projects.

In last 6 years we have relied on Managed Servers India for various hosting related projects and they have exceeded our expectations and helped us bring down the cost of managing our server infrastructure.

Solid Support

In the event of a technical issue, WIPL's team members were available 24/7. Whenever we needed any help we have found them online and accessible. Their support has been outstanding and they are fast, friendly & honest. If there is something they can do, they'll do it to support our business. And the best part is they will do it on time!

We have only good things to say about WIPL and do hope to continue with them for years to come.

Vijay Bhatter
CEO
Cyberax
Founder,India Forums