Music sensation Miley Cyrus, who is best known for her Disney character Hannah Montana, was #13 on Forbes’ “Celebrity 100” and is the “Most Charted Teen” according to the Guinness Book of World Records. She’s also an avid social media user with over 4.5 million Twitter followers to date.
A Dynamic Social Experience on the Web
Miley wants to be sure her fans around the world are kept in the loop about every appearance, video, blog post, and tweet. Her media company Interactive Media Marketing recently hired Gauged2, an interactive design agency, to revitalize her website, MileyCyrus.com. Rather than utilizing a content management system, the site is written in Ruby on Rails and pulls Cyrus’s content from the Twitter, YouTube and Tumblr APIs. This makes it easy for her team to update but still dynamic and fun for her fans.
Cyrus’s website was previously on Rackspace and EngineYard, but Gauged2 Sr. Technologist and Co-Founder Brian Burridge wanted to start his version from scratch on Heroku. “I’ve used them all and though each has its strengths and weakness, there is no doubt that Heroku is a Rails developer’s best friend,” says Burridge. “It eliminates the need to put on the system admin hat, and allows the developer to get right into the building of the product without all the work of system configuration and setup.” The site makes use of several Heroku add-ons including Airbrake, Heroku Scheduler, Memcache, New Relic, and Sendgrid.
Due to the ease in which Heroku can be scaled to provide more concurrency, Burridge and his team can quickly respond to significant spikes in usage due to breaking news relating to Miley that sends fans flooding to her site.
Convenience Without a Sacrifice in Performance
Cyrus’s new site took off with fans, quickly reaching 650,000 unique visitors in less than three months. “Heroku has had no issues handling spikes in traffic, and New Relic reports show us with a consistent Apdex score of 99,” says Burridge. “The data shows people are very satisfied with the performance of the site.” The site also kept its #1 SEO ranking for “Miley Cyrus” despite migrating from a different host.
MileyCyrus.com will continue to evolve and grow and utilize the many different forms of technology available to help Miley continue to communicate with her fans.
About The Official Miley Cyrus Site
MileyCyrus.com is the public web site for pop recording artist and TV and movie start Miley Cyrus, who became famous for her starring role as Hannah Montana on Disney.
Miley is currently the richest teen actress, with a net worth over $120 million. MileyCyrus.com currently receives over a quarter of a million unique visitors each month and is in the midst of a sizable expansion to roll out early second quarter of this year.