DOWNLOAD HALLOWEEN COSTUMES CASE STUDY
- Enabled rapid deployment
- Minimized risk during implementation
- Immediately reduced server load
- Decreased database queries by 30%
- Supporting 85% more page views per day
- Saved tens of thousands of dollars for bandwidth
- Frees IT team to focus on valueadded projects
Since 2008, Halloween Costumes has been selling its vast array of Halloween costumes and accessories online to customers around the world. As a one-stop shop for all costume needs, the site supports a variety of customers from around the world. Because the retailer generates the majority of its revenues via www.halloweencostumes.com, it does all it can to ensure optimal performance, reliability, and scalability.
After researching a few options, White chose the Akamai Dynamic Site Delivery (DSD) solution complemented by Akamai Professional Services. "We wanted to work with the best in the industry and that’s Akamai. Unlike many of its competitors, Akamai’s network spans the globe. We felt confident that the DSD solution could quickly serve our site content, even to international visitors," says White.
To start, Akamai Professional Services delivered reports that showed what Halloween Costumes could expect in terms of server offload and performance improvements based on the experience of other Akamai customers. "It was helpful to compare our target goals with Akamai customer averages. Plus, it enabled us to confirm that Akamai DSD would help us deliver the site experience we were aiming for,” explains White.
Akamai's consultants then helped Halloween Costumes in a number of areas. In addition to writing custom metafiles so the retailer could control caching on a page-by-page basis, the Professional Services team also accommodated the fact that Halloween Costumes serves images from multiple sources. Continues White: "Akamai Professional Services has seen it all and had a solution for every issue that arose. They anticipated our requirements before we did."
"I can't stress how easy it was to deploy the Akamai DSD solution – it was like flipping a switch. Akamai Professional Service did a lot
of work behind the scenes that made it extremely easy for our team to go live."
—Aaron White, CTO, Halloween Costumes
