Ease of automation, the ability to scale, and cost savings are just a few of the benefits Daily Voice has experienced in working with AWS. “Within the last year, our traffic has grown about 40 percent, and we’ve easily been able to scale up. It’s not something we really think about, it’s so simple,” said Hardman.

Daily Voice has also seen significant cost savings in utilizing Reserved Instances (RIs) the past year. “Reserved Instances were another big win for us. We’d always been running on-demand, and we just recently switched to RIs for core pieces, knowing that if we do scale up we’ll still have a use for Amazon EC2 medium instances; this has allowed us to bring down our costs by almost half for our infrastructure,” said Hardman. In total, Daily Voice estimates that the company has saved over $15,000 in annual costs by taking advantage of RIs on AWS.

Another highlight for Daily Voice has been Apparatus Infrastructure Services’ management of its environment. “Apparatus Infrastructure Services keeps our websites running, and running quickly, which is really important for our business. Page load time matters a lot to us. Our uptime matters a lot to us. If we have a crisis like Hurricane Sandy wherein our traffic suddenly spikes to three-to-four times the normal load, our servers need to be able to scale up to handle that traffic. Having someone like Apparatus Infrastructure Services there to manage that and stay on top of it gives us a lot of peace of mind to focus on content and driving as much traffic as we can,” Hardman explained.

Hardman continued, “Having Apparatus Infrastructure Services’ expertise frees our technology teams to worry about designing the right systems and tools to support our business, as opposed to keeping our servers running and everything at scale. It allows us to keep our developers focused on the user experience, as opposed to systems and infrastructure.”

“Our mission has always been to build a model that we could replicate nationally, and that’s where we’re going eventually,” said Hardman. The team is currently working with Apparatus Infrastructure Services to develop a number of new projects on AWS, and looks forward to continued growth in 2015. Said Hartman, “In the beginning of this new year, we’re asking, ‘how we can bring this community news product to a lot more readers?’”