Case Study: Hi‑Media achieves massive scale — 1 billion photos and 10 billion comments — with Amazon Web Services

Hi-Media - Customer Case Study

Hi‑Media Group is an Internet publisher that runs 20 proprietary sites (over 50 million monthly unique visitors) and provides advertising and payment services to 280,000 third‑party sites. One of its flagship properties, Fotolog, had 32 million users and heavy traffic in South America; in 2011 the Paris IT team was tasked with rebuilding the Java platform in PHP with a PostgreSQL backend, moving hosting, and completing the migration within six months while managing 32 TB of existing photos and unpredictable growth.

Hi‑Media chose AWS—using Amazon S3 for photo storage and Amazon EC2 (with ELB, EBS and PostgreSQL) for compute, ElastiCache for hot data, and Amazon SES for email—prototyped the new site in three months and launched production three months later. The move enabled rapid scale: Fotolog now stores about 1 billion photos and 10 billion comments, eliminated storage‑scale concerns, and paved the way to migrate more sites and extend the environment (for example with DynamoDB), letting the company focus on growth rather than infrastructure.

Hi-Media

Yannig Hervé

Chief Technology Officer