Dries Buytaert

How Al Jazeera successfully managed through the turmoil

The following blog post was published as a guest blog post on Forbes.com. I wrote it after Al Jazeera successfully moved some of their Drupal sites from their traditional hosting company to Acquia Hosting (now called Acquia Managed Cloud) to help them survive a 2,000% traffic increase as a result of the crises in the Middle East. The blog post provides real proof of how the Cloud helped one of the largest news organizations in the world survive one of the largest political events in the world. A fascinating story for Drupal!

Over the past decade, the Web has completely transformed how people create and consume information. We have all witnessed firsthand how the free flow of information is impacting the way individuals and companies communicate and how the rules of governance are changing for entire nations. Now, we’re all participating and reporting on events as they happen, and from where they happen.

There is no better example of that than the most recent events in the Middle East. And one organization, Al Jazeera, the world’s largest news organization solely focused on the Middle East, was right in the middle of the incredible broadcast and social media storm that instantly developed. Throughout the ordeal, Al Jazeera effectively leveraged the power of the cloud to stay on the air and scale its reach and performance. If events of the past few months are any indication, there are lessons here for other content-driven companies to consider for their own online operations.

Al Jazeera’s English operations broadcasts news and current affairs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with more than 1,000 staff members from more than 50 nations. Quite literally, Al Jazeera provides the world with a front seat on the Middle East stage. It broadcasts from centers in Doha, the capital city of the state of Qatar, Kuala Lumpur, London and Washington.

Al Jazeera’s live blog site is powered by Drupal, a free, open source social publishing platform that enables content-driven organizations to publish content and build communities quickly and easily. Drupal is used by many of the world’s most prominent organizations including the White House, the World Economic Forum, Intel, The Economist and Turner Broadcasting.

Al Jazeera’s English live blog site was a vital source for breaking news in Egypt. Bloggers were posting updates from the epicenter of the crisis and social media was often the only means of communication both inside and outside of the country. During the crisis, traffic to the Al Jazeera web site increased 1,000% and traffic to the live blog spiked 2,000%. This dilemma, normally a good one for news organizations, caused unpredictable performance and excessive page load times for site visitors.

From an infrastructure standpoint, Al Jazeera had historically hosted its blog with a traditional provider but had increasingly suffered a variety of scalability issues brought on by surging demand – unacceptable for Al Jazeera or any similar content business. What might have been just a typical technical nuisance on a mundane news day quickly became unsustainable when Egypt erupted.

Al Jazeera faced a mission-critical problem that needed a real-time solution. Where could it find performance hosting and support immediately and within a reasonable cost? Would it be secure and private? What about reliable? The answer: The cloud, the various data access, storage and hosting services available remotely over the Internet. Much discussed but often not fully appreciated by the business community, cloud services enable custom sites to perform well under varying, and sometimes severe, traffic conditions. Moving to a Drupal-supported cloud option allowed Al Jazeera to scale up quickly, dynamically render their content faster, and achieve a higher level of site reliability – issues that previously overwhelmed its physical hardware environments.

By leveraging Drupal and turning to the cloud, the Al Jazeera technical team demonstrated how to rapidly turn a seemingly disastrous situation into a net positive business decision going forward. Fast forward a few weeks, and the demands on Al Jazeera’s Web infrastructure have only increased with new crises across the region. The difference is the organization is now able to better handle these unforeseen demands and focus on the core business, reporting the news as it happens.

Digg using Drupal

Social news website Digg (ranked 116th by Alexa) is using Drupal for their corporate micro-site and blog: http://about.digg.com. Cool!

Look.co.uk switches to Drupal; traffic doubles within months

Last week I met with IPC Media in London. With magazines like Nuts, NME, Marie Claire, Country Life and many more, IPC Media is one of the UK's leading publishers.

IPC Media recently converted Look.co.uk from a bespoke ColdFusion platform to Drupal to reduce the site's maintenance cost. When I met with the team, they were very pleased with the fact that it only took a couple of months to redesign the site with Drupal and to migrate all the existing content. But best of all, thanks to Drupal's SEO (Search Engine Optimization), traffic doubled since the site was relaunched in early January. A great example of how you can use Drupal to maximize the power of your website!

Update: two IPC Media employees respond in the comments and provide some extra color; Peter Brady (lead developer look.co.uk) and Anthony Thornton (project manager look.co.uk).

Le Figaro using Drupal

Le Figaro, the oldest and second-largest national newspaper in France, started using Drupal for its social features on http://www.lefigaro.fr. It is still using its old web content management system to serve its main content, but all of the social features such as comments on articles are now provided by Drupal.

I met the engineering team, including Le Figaro's Chief Technology Officer René Wallendorf, for lunch when I was in Paris last week, and they were very happy with Drupal. The integration project was delivered on time, within budget and was considerably cheaper than the alternative solutions they had investigated. All things combined, this should be a big win for Drupal, especially in France. Vraiment très cool!

Forbes Russia using Drupal

The website of the Russian Forbes magazine was recently redesigned using Drupal. Ypa, ypa, ypa!

BBC using Drupal

BBC Magazines is the magazine publishing division of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Turns out that they have a number of magazine websites built on Drupal:

• BBC Music Magazine
• BBC Countryfile Magazine
• BBC Focus Magazine
• BBC Who Do You Think You Are Magazine
• BBC History Magazine
• BBC Home And Antiques

Can you feel the love? (Hat tip: Usamah)

Linux Journal using Drupal and Mollom

Linux Journal is a monthly magazine focused specifically on Linux. Linux Journal switched to Drupal in 2005, and hasn't looked back since. Last year in October of 2008 Linux Journal decided to turn to Mollom to protect their site against spammers.

In a case study on Mollom.com, Linux Journal Webmistress Katherine Druckman looks back at one year of using Mollom, and explains how Mollom has helped the Linux Journal staff focus on building community, rather than having to deal with spam.

To give you an idea of how much pain spammers can inflict (and how much Mollom can help); there have been many days when Mollom has blocked almost 10k spam attacks against the Linux Journal website. Last year, Mollom blocked more than 1.5 million spam messages for Linux Journal alone.

Linux Journal was the first magazine to be published about Linux, and has been an important contributor to Linux' adoption. I started reading Linux Journal back in 1997, and I still read it today. We want these kind of publications to be wildly successful in promoting Open Source software. So on rainy Mondays like today, it is stories like this, that motivate me to work on Drupal and Mollom, and that make me hate spammers even more.