Twenga Outsources Dedicated Hosting Heavy Website to Leaseweb

Twenga currently has 100 dedicated servers at the data center, more than 500 in two years!

Twenga, a global online shopping comparison site, is letting Leaseweb host its �heavy� website. The company initially needs over 100 dedicated servers, primarily to obtain all of the product data from e-commerce websites indexed by Twenga. Leaseweb has installed the dedicated servers at EvoSwitch, the CO2-neutral data center.

Twenga compares more than 70 million products in 100,000 product categories on thousands of e-commerce sites around the world. The shopping engine uses in-house developed crawl & search technology for the purpose. Twenga search results differ essentially from other comparison sites like Kelkoo, Shopping.com or Ciao.com, in that the search results are not affected by commercial deals.

Dedicated Server Amsterdam
Twenga is expanding rapidly, both in Europe and worldwide. This is why Twenga�s Management Board was looking for a hosting provider established in the Netherlands. �The Netherlands has a central location both geographically and from the Internet perspective,� explains C�dric Anes, Technical Director and Co-founder of Twenga. �Amsterdam is an important Internet node where the main telecom carriers come together. So we are very happy to have found a good hosting provider in the Netherlands.�

Dedicated hosting
Leaseweb provides a Linux-based dedicated hosting solution to Twenga, which uses the sizeable Leaseweb hosting network (with a current capacity of 210 Gbps). The rapidly growing solution initially uses over 100 servers divided over several 19-inch racks at EvoSwitch, the CO2-neutral data center (www.evoswitch.com). The hosting solution�s design was developed by Twenga�s engineers in collaboration with Leaseweb�s engineers. The server equipment � which includes crawler servers, search servers, web servers and database servers � is from Dell. Leaseweb also supplies Cisco network equipment, including firewalls, switches and load balancers, and Leaseweb provides 24×7 installation, management and knowledge-intensive support.

Hosting Bandwith
Most of the Internet traffic Twenga consumes at Leaseweb originates with the crawler, a web bot – called TwengaBot – developed by Twenga that scans over 100 million web pages every single day. The TwengaBot collects product data from over 30,000 e-commerce websites currently indexed by Twenga. �The TwengaBot demands a lot of Internet capacity from our hosting provider,’ says Anes. �We now use a total of 2000 Terabytes of bandwidth per month, but are expanding rapidly. Three-quarters of that are generated by the crawler, but fortunately Leaseweb has a lot of bandwidth available.�

Heavy Website Hosting
The heavy crawl technology will require even more hardware capacity in the near future. �A good shopping search engine that displays accurate results with the right products and prices needs a lot of capacity,� says Anes. �Right now the TwengaBot uses about 100 servers, which together scan some 100 million web pages per day. But the Leaseweb engineers will have to add new servers for us every day. I even expect that within just two years we will need to have more than 500 servers in place at the data center.�

Virtual hosting
In time, Anes wants to virtualise the hosting solution at Leaseweb, but for the time begin he wants to expand his organisation’s knowledge about virtualisation. �Leaseweb has close ties with VMware and with its expertise will be able to help us find the right virtualisation solution,� explains Anes. �It will make our infrastructure more scaleable and enable us to exploit the capacity at the data center more efficiently.�

Online Shopping Hosting
Twenga was established in 2006 by C�dric Anes and Bastien Duclaux, who saw a real need for unbiased and comprehensive shopping search engines on the market. Twenga is a product comparison site but it differs essentially from other sites like Kelkoo, Shopping.com or Ciao.com. The reason is that Twenga does not have commercial deals that affect the search results, so consumers obtain purely objective and fair search results when they use Twenga.