Case studies
What started out as a childhood passion turned out to become a lifestyle for Horațiu Boeriu, an automotive passionate and the managing editor of bmwblog.com. His love for BMW cars has driven him to start a blog after attending the BMW European Delivery Program for the first time, the original plan being to just have a place to share news, photos, and thoughts about the brand. Not long had passed until bmwblog.com became one of the most important publishers among the automotive passionate, and, over the years, it has gathered many enthusiastic readers, reaching the impressive numbers of over 5 million monthly pageviews and over 3.3 million likes on Facebook.
#Before moving to us
From a blog that stemmed out of nothing more than a hobby to the real and passionate community it is today, bmwblog.com managed to gather automotive enthusiasts from all around the world. Horațiu had a long-standing collaboration with a dedicated hosting company, but it wasn’t all that easy to manage a continuously growing blog: technical problems were becoming a daily issue.
Before switching our host company, we would experience a regular monthly downtime of at least 2-3 hours. The issue was usually related to a poorly optimized database and the lack of a proper caching mechanism. Horațiu Boeriu, Founder
Also, the technical support team did not meet expectations, their response time was longer than expected, the BMW BLOG team often being left in the dark.
#The migration process
All these problems made the team at bmwblog.com consider migrating from their hosting company to another one, and this is how they got to us. “The great caching technology, the vast experience with WordPress and the pricing model” are just a few reasons why Horațiu considered Presslabs as the first option for his new hosting company.
The transition to Presslabs was smooth, the hosting team was hands-on and available to answer all of our questions before the move. They handled the data transfer and the configuration of the hosting environment and the Wordpress back-end.
#What we did to improve performance
After the site was migrated, the addition of a CDN provided a leaner and faster way of delivering static content. For a site with so many pictures as bmwblog.com, this seems to have made a difference for the readers who noticed a speedup due to the faster front-end. Faster image serving also improved Google Image Search rankings.
#After moving to us
A substantial improvement was noticed after the changes we made in terms of smaller response time and, as of now, insignificant downtime. The database queries ran more efficiently, and PHP processes were no longer taking long to load.
“We spend less time worrying about the back-end administration and more time running our business.
Now we know that our website will be able to handle any amount of spike in traffic, so we have one less thing to worry about.
#Collaboration
The relationship formed between bmwblog.com and Presslabs has been very productive.
From the CEO down, the Presslabs team has been highly responsive and paid attention to our needs, answered our questions and even helped make decisions regarding new or existing plugins. The Presslabs staff is extremely knowledgeable and have been trained to be customer service focused.
#Conclusion
We’re extremely excited to have on board a blog as passionate and dedicated as BMW BLOG. We’ll let Horațiu’s words to do the final summing up:
We’ve accomplished something we’ve always looked for: less technical work for us and more time spent running our business.
