Almost exactly two years ago Slicksurface relaunched netterimages.com as an e-commerce site selling rights-managed medical illustrations for our client Medimedia (the Netter Collection has since been sold to Elsevier). It was an exciting time for us as it brought Slicksurface into the business of application hosting for a busy, well-regarded, public web site, and was the birth of IMG2D - our e-commerce service for selling photographs and illustrations.

In the past two years netterimages has seen a ten fold growth in traffic (from about 200,000 page hits the first month the site was up, to approximately 2 million page requests per month now). Prior to the relaunch as an e-commerce site netterimages.com had been a "brochure-ware" site (which Slicksurface had designed and hosted), so there was already some traffic on the site. However, things really took off as soon as customers saw that they could browse the entire Netter Collection on-line, then Google Images picked up the site and there was an explosive growth in traffic (Google Images is now responsible for half a million referrals each month - nearly 80% of all the referrals to the site).

With the increase in traffic came concerns about scalability as all page requests were passing through the web application (written in 4th Dimension). The problem was solved relatively simply by implementing page caching. Now, Apache (which we've always had proxy 4D) handles nearly all the page requests for web surfers who haven't logged into the site (including spiders). This has given the site new life, and there are a number of other improvements we can make should traffic continue to increase dramatically.

Tags: 4D, 4D-based-web-sites, IMG2D, Web Application Development
Categories: Web Application Development