Cali Lewis has been producing a daily tech news show for 6 years, but the new-and-even-better GeekBeat was officially launched in the summer of 2010, thanks to a vibrant partnership with John Pozadzides, founder of Woopra and HTMLHelp.com.

The GeekBeat show is distributed online in pre-recorded formats via Revision3, and also syndicated nationally on cable TV by the Youtoo network. Geek Beat served nearly 20 million online video views in 2011, and continues to grow at an amazing rate.

As GeekBeat viewership and social media surges grew, the site began to experience downtime with the dedicated server they relied on. In 2011, GeekBeat chose to convert the site’s design to one based on the Genesis framework and re-launch the new site on our Synthesis WordPress hosting. As a result, the site’s load time was reduced from 7.5 seconds to 1.4 seconds and it survived (and thrived) throughout the 2012 Consumer Electronic Show and MacWorld without a single moment of downtime.

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Since 2007, BlogWorld has provided the premier blogging event on the planet, with two yearly conferences that target new media content creators, influencers, and vendors. BlogWorld’s WordPress-based site serves as the organization’s primary information hub for attendees, as well as providing the focal point for a year-round community.

In 2011, the site began experiencing performance issues during critical pre-event traffic. The decision was made to migrate the site to Synthesis to capture some much-needed peace of mind during this twice-yearly crunch time. The Synthesis team began a migration at 5PM on a Friday evening and BlogWorld’s development team began testing two hours later. The site went live the very next morning, just days away from the BlogWorld Los Angeles show.

The site makes heavy use of images on the home page, and at over 2MB in size, it took over 15 seconds to load on the previous dedicated server. After moving to Synthesis, the initial site connection dropped to under 20 milliseconds, the “above the fold” content and images arrive in 1.2 seconds, and each of the 140 objects that comprise the home page fully load in under 3 seconds. There is no CDN or any other acceleration technology outside of the Synthesis servers involved.

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The Sports Bank (TSB) is an official Google News site. The site and its founder, Paul Banks, are consistently referenced by mainstream media websites and other prominent sports bloggers, propelling the site past the 1,000,000 monthly page view mark in 2010.

As TSB grew and began to receive even more big links, the site began to buckle under the strain of un-optimized WordPress hosting on a typical server configuration. Paul came to Synthesis in hopes of finding relief from service outages and site crashes that were becoming alarmingly frequent.

The uptime issues quickly became a thing of the past upon moving to Synthesis. A code review, however, revealed problems with the sites existing WordPress theme. Until these problems were addressed, only modest performance improvements could be expected.

In 2 ½ hours, the design team was able to reproduce the look and feel of The Sports Bank’s original design as a custom child theme for the Genesis framework. The team then picked a day that week on which they would finish the remaining items starting at 11 pm, with a goal of re-launching the site overnight.

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