Case Study: County of San Diego achieves disaster-ready scalability to 19 million page views/hour and 78% cost savings with Adxstudio on Windows Azure

San Diego Emergency Website Disaster-Ready, Scales to 19 Million Page Views Hourly

San Diego County’s Public Safety Group, working with Microsoft partner Adxstudio, faced a crisis when its emergency website crashed under massive traffic during the 2007 wildfires. The county needed a site that could scale far beyond the previous load, deliver richer, mobile-friendly content (maps, video, feeds) and be updated quickly during emergencies.

Adxstudio rebuilt the portal using Adxstudio Portals on Microsoft Dynamics CRM and hosted it on Windows Azure, enabling features like streaming video, Twitter/RSS, Bing Maps and location-based shelter info. The new site scales from three instances to support 120,000 page views per hour and tested up to 19 million hourly, avoids a $350,000 data-center build, cuts annual maintenance from $80,000 to about $18,000 (≈78% savings), and allows near–real-time updates from anywhere.

County of San Diego

Holly Crawford

Director of the Office of Emergency Services