New Business Models Need New Solutions

Technical Challenge: “Ensure Reliability of Updated Web Site in Time for Spring ‘Textbook Tuesday’ Rush”

As the leading online destination for college textbook rentals, Chegg.com has saved students at 4,000 plus campuses nationwide, well over 30 million dollars on the cost of textbooks. As a pure online business, its Web performance is heavily tied to customer service and an exceptional user experience. A few months prior to the start of the Spring semester, Chegg.com continued to progress its Web site with new functionality in order to better meet the rush of “Textbook Tuesday”, the biggest day for online book rentals. With textbook legislation recently approved by Congress and online textbook shopping at an all time high, students are embracing the ease of use and the tremendous cost savings of renting textbooks online. Due to high demand, Chegg.com expected to service up to 25,000 students at one time. Realizing that even the slightest change or update to their Web presence could impact performance, Chegg.com proactively sought to ensure the continued availability and reliability of their web site as they prepared to meet the anticipated increase in traffic and provide customer the very best shopping experience.

“All we had to do was give SOASTA our URL, let them know what we wanted to test, and SOASTA took care of the rest. Within the first hour we started seeing results and were able to troubleshoot our network and application in real time. It was easy, it was affordable and it was fast.” – Osman Rashid, CEO

SOASTA CloudTest Solution

“Our business rides on our web site,” said Osman Rashid, CEO of Chegg.com. “We need to be available and reliable no matter how many customers we are servicing.” Chegg.com turned to SOASTA and its CloudTest On-Demand service to load test their site. CloudTest On-Demand generated load by provisioning servers from a leading Cloud environment. They then directed that traffic to the Chegg.com site and ran load tests that gauged page response rate and simulated varying levels of simultaneous users (10K to 15K to 25K to 35K users). With each test, performance levels increased and error rate decreased to approximately zero. With CloudTest On-Demand, Chegg.com was able to quickly understand how their application and their network would perform in production before going live. Chegg.com passed the test and their customers benefited from a reliable shopping environment.