Case Study: iStockphoto achieves Top-100 U.S. scale with MySQL Enterprise Unlimited

iStockphoto Grows to a Top-100 U.S. Website with MySQL Enterprise Unlimited

iStockphoto, the world’s busiest image marketplace and a pioneer of micropayments for stock imagery, grew from a single-server startup to a global community with 1.5 million members, over 1.8 million assets, 35,000 contributors and 30,000 new images added weekly. This explosive growth made scalability mission-critical and forced the company to balance rising data and transaction volumes against IT budgets and resource constraints.

To meet that challenge iStockphoto scaled out on a LAMP stack using MySQL on commodity hardware—operating 17 replicated MySQL servers (528 tables, 512 million rows)—and subscribed to MySQL Enterprise Unlimited for 24/7 support, updates and advanced monitoring. The result was sustained high performance and reliable operations that supported rapid growth and helped the site rise into the top 100 U.S. websites.

iStockphoto

Brent Nelson

Director of IT and Infrastructure