Case Study: Haymarket Media Group achieves 8x higher platform efficiency and reduced infrastructure costs with MongoDB

Haymarket Migrates from MySQL to MongoDB, Achieving 8x Higher Platform Efficiency

Haymarket Media Group’s PistonHeads team faced growing scalability and personalization challenges as classifieds and audience engagement moved online. Their ASP.NET/MySQL stack hit limits — even with caching — forcing a costly web tier of 24 servers and constraining new analytics and personalization features for dealers and advertisers.

They migrated catalog, engagement and analytics workloads to MongoDB on AWS (SSD-backed replica sets), built PistonHub to consolidate ad and Google Analytics data, and moved page elements and reference data into MongoDB. The change cut the web tier from 24 to 3 servers (about 8x efficiency), supports ~650K ads/month (50M documents YTD), sped time to market, reduced costs, improved performance and reliability, increased ad analytics/CPM, and became the company’s default database for cloud-ready applications.

Haymarket Media Group

Peter Dignan

Platform director Haymarket Media Group