HiFi Stats Reveal - 30% Monthly Growth

This is a report on how our bet on the skilled, rogue freelancer and the growing small agency has worked out as we approach our software-as-a-service's first year of operation. 

We took a risk when we decided to build HiFi: create a professional grade software-as-a-service product in the website content management space dominated by consumer do-it-yourself, cookie-cutter, template driven products. While most content management system services are a play to displace professionals with software, HiFi's goal is to amplify professional web developers with better software and infrastructure. For too long the freelance and small agency status quo has been expensive self-installed, self-maintained software on overcrowded, underpowered servers. Our wild bet was that by killing it on the fundamentals of having a great JSON API, a powerful infrastructure, and best-in-class, knowledgeable support, we could alleviate the aspects of modern website site development that, frankly, suck (you know, things like maintaining server software and configuration, losing sleep over uptime and reliability, updating software to fix bugs and security issues, custom queries for data, effectively compiling and compressing CSS, LessCSS, JavaScript, and CoffeeScript, and so on), and help professional developers focus on what they love most: designing and implementing great web sites.

Only a year in it's still early to make a call, but so far the freelancers and agencies have invested in the switch to HiFi have not only loved the experience but have increased their productivity substantially. We're really encouraged not only in the feedback, but in the hard numbers. Publicly, for the first time, here they are...

Growth

Let’s start with number of websites powered by HiFi. For our purposes we define this metric as the number of live websites that received traffic. This means free trial sites and sites that are currently in production but not yet live are not counted. From May through November of 2010 HiFi was in beta. In less than a year since coming out of Beta the total number of web sites powered by HiFi has grown more than 350 percent.

Monthly page views is another interesting measurement we look. September was a record setting month for HiFi with over 2.5 million page views served. By the end of October HiFi should surpass 20 million page views served since inception.

Site Speed

We spent some time earlier this month improving our caching system so not only are we serving more page views than ever before, they’re getting served faster than ever before. Cached pages are now served ~100ms faster than before which represents a 5-10x improvement in page load speed depending on client internet connection. You can really feel the difference in clicking around sites on HiFi!

HiFi web sites are much more than just HTML pages, across the board each page contains beautiful graphics, meticulous CSS and LESS files, and powerful JavaScript and CoffeeScript programs. We serve all of these assets up, too. In fact, HiFi has served over 150,000,000 requests total across website front- and back-ends. During peak hours we average up to 33 requests per second with bursts of over 100 requests per second.

Reliability

We haven't found competing services that are publishing their exact monthly uptime records but we think it's important. This is something we lose sleep over, we're proud of, and in recent months HiFi is more reliable than ever. Since June 1st, 2011 we have a 99.998% uptime record. In the trailing year we're just a hundredth of a percent shy of that at 99.989%. Here's a look at HiFi's uptime, as measured on minute intervals by Pingdom, in the trailing year:

Bigger, Faster, Stronger

Our team is really pleased with how quickly the number of live public sites on HiFi is growing. Not only are we seeing sites grow their traffic by leveraging the baked-in features of HiFi, but we are seeing bigger sites moving to HiFi as well. This is evident in that from September of 2010 to September of 2011 our number of live sites has grown by 5x and overall page views by 8x. With recent updates we are serving these websites faster and more reliably than ever before and with no additional effort needed on the web site developer’s part.