www.lonelyplanet.com

solutions:

• Dynamic Site Accelerator
• Professional Services
• Site Assessment

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• Tapped into expert insights and recommendations for improved performance
• Improved global performance by 285% on average
• Offloaded an average of 40% of bandwidth
• Offloaded 66% of requests from hotel booking site

For over 30 years, Lonely Planet has inspired and guided independent travellers to explore the world around them. The company’s award-winning website offers over 20,000 pages of detailed, on-the-spot information, reviewed by an ongoing army of dedicated authors on the road. In addition to accessing information via the site, visitors can exchange travel information, advice, hints and tips with other travellers; purchase books; and book hotels. The site serves nearly 2.5 million page views per day to 500,000 unique visitors.

Realizing that it would be cost prohibitive and complicated to contract with multiple hosting facilities in different geographies, Lonely Planet researched third-party solutions. Initially, the company chose Akamai for dynamic site acceleration and another content delivery network (CDN) provider for video delivery. After realizing tremendous benefits from the Akamai Dynamic Site Acceleration (DSA) solution, Lonely Planet also shifted its video content to the Akamai network for better quality and reliability.

Professional Services began by reviewing Lonely Planet’s online goals, its setup for creating and delivering site content, and its configurations for Akamai services. With these insights, the consultants drafted extensive recommendations for a more optimal configuration of the Akamai DSA service. "With the guidance of Akamai's consultants, we were able to focus our efforts where they would have the most impact," says Kennedy.

Lonely Planet implemented these suggestions, including altering features on its server to control cacheability in browsers and to improve how Akamai requests content from the origin and delivers it to the site visitor. At the same time, Professional Services tweaked settings within the Akamai network to enhance deliverability of Lonely Planet's dynamic content.