

Infrastructure at 99designs - lars512
http://99designs.com/tech-blog/blog/2012/01/30/infrastructure-at-99designs/

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jedberg
They mentioned that S3 is too slow for customers, so they serve the data from
their app and cache it. Later they mentioned the site is slow for non-US users
and they are looking at a CDN for their static assets.

I wonder, have they looked at Cloudfront, which would solve both of these
problems for them?

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lars512
In our current model, some of our static media are generated asynchronously,
but basically on demand. That's the main reason why we don't serve media
directly from Cloudfront/S3. We're certainly considering Cloudfront with a
custom origin as on the possible CDNs.

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DanBlake
99Designs seems to be almost entirely dynamic and likely changing all the
time. Why is there a need for so many varnish servers? Why did you go with
(slower) Varnish over nginx or gwan? There seems like alot of infrastructure
in place for the traffic levels.

I only ask because we run nginx as a cache and the vast majority of our
content is served directly from it ( almost 80% of page loads are served via
cache ) and a single nginx process handles everything for us.

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jedberg
> Why is there a need for so many varnish servers?

Probably because a lot of their assets are static image files.

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DanBlake
Ah, so its a filesize issue? ie- they have xxx TB of storage and they
obviously need one cache/serving process per machine.

I was just curious why there was so many cache process's needed but this makes
sense.

These guys might make good use of the open source backblaze specs- I know we
are looking into this for some storage of video/image data :
[http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-
budget-v...](http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-
budget-v2-0revealing-more-secrets/)

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anon182739
Any word on the number of Varnish servers, app servers, db servers, etc? and
specs

BTW there appears to be no link to your site from your blog.

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jchung
Forgot about the layer where designers do work for free in the hopes of
besting their peers in design battle to win a disappointingly small payoff.

~~~
lox
We started 99designs to provide opportunities to designers. Each month more
and more designers make meaningful salaries from the site and connect with
customers that they would otherwise have had to pitch for. Customers who
wouldn't have previously paid for design are learning design is worth paying
for.

It's hard for any industry to face change, but developers survived outsourcing
and photographers survived stock photography. Both industries are still
flourishing.

~~~
throw981
I had the worst experience using 99designs. The "designers" were terrible. The
sketches they submitted shows that they barely have any design skills, when I
reject their designs they start to complain and build up bad reputation around
you.

Most if not all freelancing sites start well until they are discovered by
unqualified people from India and the likes.

~~~
hengli
I'm looking at the case studies of completed designs. They seem fairly
unsatisfactory to me.

