SecretSanta.com

Content delivery network makes online
gift exchanging faster and cost-effective

Industry
Social Networking

Profile
Free online gift exchange management service

Challenge
SecretSanta.com provides a digital "hat" online from which groups of colleagues, families and friends can draw names for gift exchanges. The turnkey service also sends out customized email invitations and reminders, randomly assigns all members of a gift exchange to a secret gift-giver, helps recipients publish a wish-list and even helps users shop for recipients. Although the service is provided for free, users rely on it for their holiday events, and so SecretSanta.com knew that they would need to find a dedicated server with a stable, highly available network that users would be able to access quickly and securely.

With clients logging in from around the world, SecretSanta.com also faced the challenge of being able to make the site quickly accessible to users geographically dispersed. SecretSanta.com feels very strongly that it is critical for users to be satisfied with the service and the speed with which they can access the site, no matter how far they need to travel via the Internet. Long distances on the Internet can often lead to increased lag time (or latency), which SecretSanta.com feared would become an issue for people conducting gift exchanges with individuals overseas.

Being in the startup phase of their business also meant that SecretSanta.com needed to control costs. Hiring an IT professional to take care of their online needs would have been useful, but not cost effective, so they had to find a viable alternative.

Solution
Working with their account manager, SecretSanta.com selected a dedicated server on which the company hosts their website and database. With PEER 1's 100% network uptime guarantee they don't need to worry that the website will be available no matter when or how many people are on the site. The low monthly fee combined with PEER 1's knowledgeable, pro-active support staff means that the start-up company doesn't need to make the costly investment in an IT professional to look after the company's web needs.

In order to counteract potential latency issues, SecretSanta.com signed up for PEER 1's RAPID EDGE content delivery network by simply submitting their URL to PEER 1's engineering team. Now, RAPID EDGE automatically stores SecretSanta.com's content on caching servers placed all over the PEER 1 network. That covers 16 major city centers in North America and Europe. RAPID EDGE directs SecretSanta.com users to the nearest caching server (ie. Japanese users are directed to Los Angeles, German users are directed to London). This reduces latency which dramatically improves the web site's performance and user experience.

Since becoming a customer of PEER 1, SecretSanta.com has experienced increased traffic to their website and positive feedback from customers.

Benefits

• Guaranteed 100% network uptime
• Reduced latency for users
• Easy to scale
• Saved on IT costs
• Increased traffic to the site and positive feedback from customers