Case Study: Newsweek achieves 75% operating-cost reduction and scales to millions of page views with Amazon Web Services

Newsweek - Customer Case Study

Newsweek, a New York–based news publication with about 200–250 employees, sought major cost reductions in 2009 and decided to move its online operations from a co-location facility to the cloud. After evaluating options, the company selected Amazon Web Services for its broad service stack and ability to meet the performance and management needs of a high-traffic media site.

Newsweek rebuilt its infrastructure on AWS using EC2, S3, RDS, CloudFront and later Route 53, enabling automation and easier DNS management. The migration cut DNS costs by 93% and reduced overall monthly operating costs by 75%, while halving system-administration headcount. The site now sustains over 1 million page views per hour on seven production VMs and can scale to 11 VMs to handle more than 5 million page views per hour, with ongoing efforts to further optimize automation and performance.

Newsweek

Nathan Butler

The Newsweek