Case Study: The Onion achieves reduced downtime and faster deployments with Linode

The Onion Finds Simplicity, Reliability, and Flexibility with Linode

Onion, Inc., the parent of The Onion, A.V. Club, and Clickhole, reaches over 11 million unique visitors a month. After years on on‑site dedicated servers, the company struggled with application errors, frequent downtime, slow server provisioning, poor monitoring and inefficient use of capital — problems compounded by a small operations team.

The Onion migrated its infrastructure to Linode, running 51 Linodes with private networking and a dual caching layer (Varnish plus CDNetworks CDN) and using tools like LISH, StackScripts and Linode’s DNS Manager for fast, reliable administration. The new setup simplified deployments and maintenance, improved performance and redundancy, and delivered measurable results: reduced downtime, much faster deployments, and streamlined server provisioning and infrastructure management.

The Onion

Chris Sinchok

Senior Developer, The Onion