Patch.com Leverages Pantheon Website Management Platform To Deliver New Media Model

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 7, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Pantheon, the only website management platform for WordPress and Drupal, announced today that Patch, the nationwide media platform providing hyperlocal news, has standardized on the Pantheon platform to power its 915 community properties. With Pantheon, Patch is able to consolidate properties, increase uptime and pageviews, reduce infrastructure costs, and mitigate risks on the growing site. Running on Pantheon, Patch.com serves over 50 million pageviews a month at 99.969% uptime across approximately 35 million URLs, 40 terabytes of images, 6 million users, and 500 terabytes of video, with only four developers.

"Leaving our infrastructure and processes in Pantheon's hands allows us to concentrate on innovation," said Abraham Brewster, CTO of Patch. "Innovation, when you are running at this scale and speed, comes with both successes and mistakes, and unexpectedly some of them can cripple a system. The parallel scaling on the Pantheon platform gives us the cushion to innovate."

Founded in 2007 by Tim Armstrong, Warren Webster and Jon Brod, Patch was created to be an online local community bulletin board and news source. Under its new Editor in Chief, Warren St. John, Patch now publishes up to 1,000 stories a day. Writers and community members can post directly to a given Patch, fostering a community-centric news forum with the most relevant information for the local audience. 100,000 different articles are read on Patch.com on any given day and 12,000 URLs are accessed every 10 minutes on the site. However, management and increased infrastructure costs hindered the team's ability to continue to innovate. In 2014, Brewster consolidated Patch's footprint on the Pantheon platform from 2684 domains to 1, 96 servers to 15 and over 900 websites to 1.

"Pantheon is an architecture Patch can leverage and grow on," said Brewster. "The real selling points for us were speed, risk mitigation, and flexibility of development. Since the whole thing is built on a services-based architecture, we can leverage its independent parts as the backbone of an app. Different pieces of the stack can be called individually, all insulated by Varnish caching wrappers that mitigate the risk of a 'noisy neighbor' process bringing down the whole neighborhood."

Today, on Pantheon, Patch.com runs with 8,000 pageviews at any given moment, and doesn't break a sweat when spikes reach up to 3 million pageviews in a day. No downtime means the team isn't worried about losing valuable advertising revenue or readership, and leveraging Varnish allows the team to test and innovate efficiently. And Patch.com is running incredibly fast—down from 2 seconds on AOL to 450-500 milliseconds on AWS to sub-240 milliseconds on Pantheon.

About Pantheon
Founded in 2010, Pantheon is the only Drupal and WordPress website management platform, running more than 100,000 sites in the cloud. Pantheon's multi-tenant, container-based platform enables developers, creative agencies, and companies to manage all of their websites from a single dashboard. Pantheon delivers the fastest, most secure platform for developing, testing, and launching all your websites. Customers including Arizona State University, Cisco, Intel, and United Nations trust the Pantheon platform. For more information about Pantheon, visit: https://pantheon.io

SOURCE Pantheon

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