El Confidencial

Content delivery speed and low latencies are essential requirements for El Confidencial, to ensure it provides good service and a good user experience to its readers. Plus, it needs to have good SEO positioning to boost load speed.

Because keeping content up-to-date is so important to a media outlet, minimum purge times are another must. With the high volumes of traffic moved by the site, this also helps with cost savings.

For El Confidencial, Transparent Edge’s CDN is an indispensable mechanism to keep its readers informed in real time. News coverage is always evolving, so it’s essential to be able to edit, publish, and invalidate content quickly, guaranteeing that all readers see the latest version. Transparent Edge’s CDN takes care of that too.

Breaking news is particularly important because the need to quickly invalidate content produces traffic spikes when there is a substantial increase in the number of concurrent users accessing the information. These situations can’t be predicted because the news is unpredictable, which is why it’s critical to have flexible and robust architecture and exceptional caching techniques.

Digital newspapers also experience traffic spikes when they are subject to a DDoS attack. El Confidencial has suffered several large ones, which were all successfully fended off thanks to the anti-DDoS feature built into our CDN. El Confidencial also depends on the WAF of our content delivery system, which analyzes traffic in real time looking for malicious requests and making threats visible so immediate action can be taken.

As a high-quality digital newspaper, El Confidencial works with many content formats beyond text and photos. Its videos add value and are a featured element of the site. Our video transcoding functionality ensures all video contributions can be converted to the standard formats and optimized for web delivery.

With Transparent Edge, El Confidencial gets the peace of mind of knowing that when there are increased requests for breaking news it won’t overload its origin. This was made apparent on June 2, 2015, when the newspaper broke the story of the abdication of King Juan Carlos I of Spain hours before it was officially announced by President Mariano Rajoy. That morning, the number of unique visitors to the El Confidencial website grew several times over and our CDN absorbed the traffic spike seamlessly, protecting the newspaper’s origin servers against the avalanche of requests. It did the same when the newspaper broke the news of the Panama Papers and the Florentino Pérez tapes and the requests per second went through the roof.

Instead of investing its economic resources in keeping inactive servers in anticipation of these spikes, El Confidencial has chosen to have Transparent Edge as a cache provider on the edge. It no longer has to store all of its content on its own servers, taking pressure off its origin.

Support is essential for a media outlet of the caliber of El Confidencial because any problem that affects content delivery could negatively impact its reputation. That’s why it’s necessary to have real proactive support from engineers, who flag issues even before the newspaper’s own team detects them.