Case Study: Boston Herald achieves uninterrupted, scalable coverage during a 10x traffic surge with Acquia Cloud

Boston Herald Website Performs Under Pressure

The Boston Herald, a major local news site, needed a more reliable, scalable platform after an earlier outage left its site down during a 2011 traffic surge. When the Boston Marathon bombing generated unpredictable, intense demand for breaking news, the Herald required a system that could handle massive, immediate spikes and let editors publish updates quickly.

The Herald moved to Drupal and Acquia Cloud—launching the new site in three months—and Acquia provisioned additional virtual machines within minutes of the bombing. The combination allowed the site to absorb a 10x traffic increase with no downtime, maintain over 99.95% uptime, serve more than 1 million visitors a day on average, and give editors the agility to update pages without developer intervention.

Boston Herald

Jennifer Morse

Vice President of Digital Operations