Launched in 2011, Maroela Media has steadily established themselves as one of the largest online Afrikaans communities in South Africa with around 25 000 visits to the website on a daily basis. With a strong focus on the love and nostalgia for the Afrikaans language, culture and heritage and all that it entails, Maroela Media has captured the heart of a large section of the South African population, offering free, well-written content to an enthusiastic Afrikaans market. Community-driven, Maroela Media’s platforms encourage active debate and participation which has helped to drive the massive growth and success of the site.

“a number of page views increased by about 23% (almost 1 million) in three months, and we have also recently crossed our record for the most page views in a day.”

With the phenomenal growth of Maroela Media, the business soon realized the need for a flexible and reliable hosting service that could provide a constantly positive experience for their rapidly growing readership. Kobus Bezuidenhout, Maroela Media’s Head Developer notes, “We required a hosting setup that could quickly adapt to our fast-growing readership and our journalist’s needed dedicated resources for publishing.”

A cost-effective solution

It is these requirements that lead Maroela Media to contact RSAWEB for support through our Virtual Data Centre (VDC) services; Enterprise Cloud. Bezuidenhout explains: “When we redesigned our website, the new design used all the available capacity on our physical servers. Upgrading these servers would be quite expensive, so we decided that we needed to switch to the more flexible VDC. Running our old servers at full capacity forced us to optimize our website, which would ultimately save us money when we made the move to the VDC.”

Cloud experts

Bezuidenhout continues, “Our previous hosting setup was a small team, and while they did a great job, there was always a risk that they would not be able to service us on time, and we were unsure what would happen if they fell away. We were previously quite hands-on with the setup of our own servers, but that was very nerve-wracking and a big responsibility for our team. RSAWEB’s service reduces our risk by having a team of experts attending to our needs.”

Flexible resources

RSAWEB’s purpose-built and fully-owned data centres revolutionized the South African data environment by bringing world class data centre facilities to the local market. Providing international standards is not the only benefit of making use of RSAWEB’s VDC products as the service also offers around the clock, hands-on technical assistance teams for all clients.

“Despite the increase in traffic, our journalists are less stressed and frustrated as they no longer have to wait to load content and can focus on their jobs better. Management also sleeps better because of the overall decreased risk.”

Where previously Maroela Media had to make use of a team of internal resources to manage their servers and web updates, through the use of RSAWEB’s VDC and the support team included with the service, Maroela Media has also been able to reduce their resource requirements and now only needs a team of two people to manage the entire system.

High performance

Through Enterprise Cloud, RSAWEB provides Maroela Media with the peace of mind that their business’ online infrastructure is secure, fast and infinitely scalable. “RSAWEB’s VDC directs the admin traffic to one server and ensures that the public traffic does not disrupt the publishing process,” says Bezuidenhout. The increase in traffic to the website and the new design created an additional requirement within the business, as the front-end consumer-facing website needed to function seamlessly, while in the background various functions needed to be run without causing the site to slow down or load slowly.

Scalability

In the past three months since moving across to RSAWEB’s VDC service, Maroela Media’s website traffic and requirements have continued to grow. “a number of page views increased by about 23% (almost 1 million) in three months, and we have also recently crossed our record for the most page views in a day”, says Bezuidenhout. But the implementation of the easily managed service has made a large impact on the business in a variety of other ways, as Bezuidenhout explains: “Despite the increase in traffic, our journalists are less stressed and frustrated as they no longer have to wait to load content and can focus on their jobs better. Management also sleeps better because of the overall decreased risk.”

Ultimately through RSAWEB’s Enterprise Cloud, Maroela Media has been able to rapidly grow their online audience while simply and easily scaling their resources without needing to take on additional staff or to impact their reader’s experience.