40+ different high traffic sites from a single Umbraco installation
by Alex Bailes
@Alex_bailes
- Countrywide plc
and Jiri Banas - Countrywide plc
The Session
This session is of interest to anyone who is thinking of scaling up their Umbraco offerings using the concepts of shared and bespoke content on a single Umbraco installation.
We will explore the mysteries of load balancing high traffic Umbraco websites, as well as moving changes across development, staging and production environments, using Umbraco Courier and out of the box components.
We will share with you the various implementation challenges we have faced when migrating from our in house build .NET platform onto CMS, and describe how we effectively created a scalable Umbraco powered web front end communicating with a large back end application server.
Examples of our Umbraco-powered sites: http://www.hamptons.co.uk and http://www.sothebysrealty.co.uk
The Speakers
Alex has been working with bleeding edge web development for nearly two decades. His experience spans from the early days of the web in 1996 with VRML, to today’s real-time APIs, geo-spatial, and natural language technologies.
Having founded and sold two online businesses to large multi-national organizations over his career, he now heads up the online operation of the UK’s largest estate agency Group, Countrywide plc. His team offer innovative online solutions to many aspects of the challenging UK property market and its divisions, including; sales, lettings, mortgages, insurance, conveyancing and associated services.
A notable proponent of Umbraco, Alex has been driving adoption of this platform across Countrywide’s vast online estate over the last 3 years, extolling its virtues to anyone who will listen!
Jiri took his first steps into the world of IT business when he was just 12 years old. He created and sold his first “commercial program”, coded in Basic on a home built Atari “Mickey”, to his class mates. The primitive, less than 20 lines of code, program, which was designed to help fellow students with their homework, was a “huge success” and triggered an ever-lasting passion for programming and solutions architecture. Today Jiri works as Head of Development at Umbraco Gold partner, Countrywide plc, in the United Kingdom and the USA.
At Countrywide plc, the largest estate and lettings agency in the UK, we spent a considerable amount of time looking for a mature, extendable, .NET based content management system. We were keen to find an easy to develop, user-friendly system and Umbraco ticked all the boxes. Today we run over 40 high traffic desktop and mobile websites on a single installation.