Milesource.com relies on Caché for success on the Web

Key Benefits

  • The Web
  • Scalability
  • Cost-effectiveness

As competition increases and as worldwide economies rise and fall, the life expectancy of any business trying to make it on the Internet keeps getting shorter. Consider a recent week in the life of Caché user, Milesource.com. In one week, six of its competitors went out of business. And it's scary to think that whatever it was that sunk those businesses in a single week may have you in its sights next time.

But Christopher Wallace, Milesource's director of technology, feels he has reason to feel safe. Milesource, a Web site that awards mileage points to its visitors for using Milesource as a portal to other sites, didn't take the typical dot-com approach. "We didn't take a boatload of money," said Wallace. "We actually grew the business."

And Wallace's confidence is also based on the fact that the Milesource site is powered by Caché.

"We feel Caché's strength lies in it's ability to scale," explained Wallace. "Our site gets 290,000 unique visitors a day. That translates into 10 million hits or two million page views a day, and Caché can handle that kind of stress."

"No other product has the linear scalability of Cache. Oracle just wouldn't have stood up, at least not on the minimal hardware requirements of Cache.
With Oracle, we would be looking at about half a million dollars in just hardware."

- F Harvell
President
ICGate

F Harvell, president of ICGate, Inc, the VAR that built Milesource's site, has equal admiration for Caché's scalability. "No other product has the linear scalability of Caché," he stated unequivocally. Harvell compared Caché to Oracle and found there really was no comparison. ""We generate a lot of dynamic Web pages and we needed a database technology that would support a very large number of requests,".he said. "Oracle just wouldn't have stood up, at least not on the minimal hardware requirements of Cache. With Oracle, we would be looking at about half a million dollars in just hardware." The Milesource.com Web site runs on six Intel servers running Linux. There is one database server, four application/Web servers, and one server for administrative support.

And while Caché was chosen for its scalability, what really sold Milesource was InterSystems' support. "We were having some performance problems and we immediately got high-level response from InterSystems," said Wallace. "We never would have gotten that kind of response from Oracle or IBM. They probably would have just opened up a ticket and we would have waited."

"With the success we're experiencing we're constantly attracting more customers," said Wallace. "We have faith that Caché will handle the load."