Case Study: InfoSpace achieves 72% capital budget reduction and faster search response times with Amazon Web Services

InfoSpace - Customer Case Study

InfoSpace, a Blucora subsidiary that powers metasearch and monetization for partners and brands like Dogpile and MetaCrawler, handles roughly 128 million queries and 75–80 GB of logs daily. With colocation contracts expiring, ongoing power and maintenance issues, and more than $1.3M needed for a hardware refresh, the company needed a way to scale globally and improve search response times without large capital outlays.

InfoSpace migrated its Microsoft .NET/Windows Server stack to AWS (using VPC, EC2 Windows AMIs across regions, CloudFront, Route 53, S3, ELB) and modernized operations with Chef, Sumo Logic, and a “fire and forget” testing tool, completing the move in six months and shifting most traffic in about 2.5 weeks. The move improved international response times ~20% (domestic ~10%), cut 2013 capital spend by 72%, is projected to reduce operating expenses ~32%, sped deployments from two weeks to ~20 minutes, and enabled rapid global expansion.

InfoSpace

Wayson Vannatta

Sr. Director of IT and Operations