Making Money with PHP
- by Rinat Gersch, Zend Technologies
The dynamic PHP-based elements of an adult site are often the most mission-critical. Not only does performance affect your operating costs, it also reflects directly on the end-user experience. Whether PHP is used to serve member's pages, in the sign-up process or in the user tracking system, its speed is directly correlated with the bottom line. This article lets the experts tell their tale. Read how adult companies use PHP and Zend (www.zend.com/adult) to cut down on operational costs while significantly improving their programs, and make more $$ for themselves and their partners.
Purecash Runs One Of The Highest Volume Sites On A Single Server
PureCash, by Hirise, is a very extensive web master program that would normally require significant maintenance and behind-the-scenes work. With a goal to make as much money as possible for their affiliate members, efficiency and speed were top priority. PureCash's technology and infrastructure were well thought out from theirits' inception, and designed with the most sophisticated technology in mind - b. It is based on a content management system, with PHP responsible for the dynamics, and utilizinges a tracking system to monitor activities and accumulate statistics. PureCash relies on Zend Performance Suite to provide this sophisticated technology with top-notch performance.
PureCash includes a tour area, members' area and advertisement console that are all run from the same server, calling the MySQL DB for content. Christian Burck, lead PHP developer, explains, "The galleries in the members area constantly call the DB. With some scripts exceeding one million hits a day, our database was operating under considerable strain.". PureCash takes advantage of ZPS's flexible caching mechanisms to improve performance. All scripts are accelerated, standard pages are fully cached and the members' areas are mainly using partial page caching. Christian elaborates, "Our tracking and advertising systems get a massive hit rate, 40K-50K per hour. Now, we have accelerated both those systems. On the other hand, the members' area is a perfect candidate for caching, because it's where we want to provide users with the ultimate experience, but it's also a heavy load on the database. EBut each member page includes elements that must change with every access, f, for example, the favorite gallery listing. These elements shouldn't be cached. The solution to get the best of both worlds is to use ZPS partial page caching capabilities, enabling us to exclude those elements that shouldn't be cached. With ZPS, we cache for a lifetime of an hour or more, with our main scripts' performance improved seven times on average 7 times, some as much as 50 times, as well as the database and CPU load decreased by half."
"Using ZPS helps the team maximize the functionality and usability of PureCash," says Ed Twilbeck, PureCash project manager. "Time-to-market and reliability were essential. We wanted to go with something that we knew would work right out of the box, and ZPS answered our criteria. Not only that, but but without ZPS we wouldn't be able to run the whole PureCash operation on a single sever as we do today, significantly increasing hardware and maintenance costs."
Secrets to Capturing More Members
Everyone knows that the "real money" for adult sites comes from membership. Programs relying on members are generating those $$ by concentrating on the membership sign-up process - the process that takes potential subscribers and converts them to members. Often the decision to become a member is a spur of the moment one. If provided with too much time to think, with slow response time, the potential member would be lost. Speed is essential. The CTO of one of the leading programs explains, "If done well, the membership sign,up process has a direct, positive affect on the bottom line, if done well it has a direct, positive affect on the bottom line, If done poorly, you are just leaving money on the table. With Zend Performance Suite (ZPS), we've improved the sign-up response sixtime 6 times, meaning that we've increased our ability to capture members by just that much. When you're running over 1000 consumer-facing sites, and they're all based on PHP, you want to be in a close relation with the PHP experts, so the relationship with Zend paid off when our servers became sluggish."
As a result of an unexpected influx ofin traffic, even a dual-CPU machine might stumble under the transactions load. In such a case, the sign-up process slows down as much as up to three3 seconds a page, which is unacceptable. The eaffect of the Zend Accelerator in such a situation is immediate. Following the quick installation of the Zend Accelerator on the sign-up infrastructure at a customer site , consisting of 12 servers, the server CPU load was significantly reduced and response time improved.
Hotmovies Utilizes tThe Zend Accelerator aAnd Saves $20K oOn Hardware
Hotmovies.com is a movie site where webmasters can find "first run" and "hard to find" content for their Wweb sites in a pay-per-view format.
Due to its content and unique pay-per-view business model, HotMovies.com Wweb site popularity quickly rose. Mark Farlow, Director of Web Development, recalls, "With 30,000 visits per day we quickly realized that our hardware infrastructure would not stand up to the performance levels we required for our customers. With forecasts of continuing growth we were quickly outgrowing the capabilities of a single front-end Wweb server.". At that point they turned to Zend, the PHP company, in order to to try out the Zend Accelerator.
The activities on HotMovies.com include mainly viewing on-line movies and purchasing via the store. The site's infrastructure includes: (1) Microsoft Media server, serving up the movies and (2) A server hosting the store and (3) Web server servicing all incoming Wweb customers. "The Wweb server is an online storefront, it receives all incoming traffic and hence it is the actual bottleneck in our architecture,", says Mark. The load among the servers is divided according to the surfer activity: surfers arriving on hotmovies.com can browse through samples of movies, all served up from the Wweb server; the full-length video is served from the media server; purchasing is routed to the shopping cart.
The alternative to using the Zend Accelerator was to purchase a new server. A new server would cost $10-$20k, depending upon the type of server. Mark summarizes, "At the time of launch, with a single Wweb server, we were serving roughly 40 pages per second. Following the short and straightforward installation of the Zend Accelerator, we were serving 150 per second - that's , x3.75 times more pages per second. The Zend Accelerator, with its low price point, was certainly worth every dime!"
About the Authors:
Rinat Gersch is a product manager at Zend Technologies, the internationally recognized PHP authority founded by the designers of PHP and the upcoming PHP5. Zend builds premiere solutions to develop, protect and scale PHP applications. Rinat can be reached at rinat.g@zend.com.
Tanguy is an experienced Wweb developer with six6 years experience at Igallery. Today he heads a technical consulting company, 0x7a69. Tanguy is a PHP addict and a satisfied Zend customer. Tanguy can be reached at tanguy@zend.com
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