11 ms·

PlentyOfFish - 6 Billion Pageviews And 32 Billion Images A Month

86 points by yarapavan 15y ago

yarapavan 15y ago
A more detailed post on PlentyOfFish architecture - http://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture http://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture
citricsquid 15y ago
"POF has one single employee: the founder and CEO Markus Frind. Makes up to $10 million a year on Google ads working only two hours a day. 30+ Million Hits a Day (500 - 600 pages per second)." I find this more interesting than the parent article; although it seems clear hiring more people helped them expand (and handle that expansion) a lot, a single employee/founder doing that much is crazy impressive. From: http://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture http://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture
- saurik 15y ago
  You might enjoy this article, then (I read it in a physical copy of Inc. a few years ago, and remember really liking it). http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/and-the-money-comes-rolling-in.html http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/and-the-money-comes-rol...
- blurbytree 15y ago
  ...and anyone here can make a comfortable income from adsense. Do not believe the hivemind here that advertising based income isn't possible.
  - citricsquid 15y ago
    Not sure your point, I make my income from advertising (well company does and pays me, same thing right?) my fascination was with the single employee part.
    - blurbytree 15y ago
      Oh definitely. I was just pointing out that it's a very viable model for anyone here to copy, contrary to the advice of most here.
  - chc 15y ago
    Nobody's saying it's impossible — just that like many other possible sources of revenue, such as lottery tickets, it isn't very dependable. If you're able to get 200 million pageviews a day, all sorts of avenues for making money are open to you. For most prospective businesses, though, "I will get 200 million pageviews a day and be able to maintain it practically by myself" is not a very safe assumption to make.
- rokhayakebe 15y ago
  Does POF still have one employee?
  - rfolstad 15y ago
    Nope we've got a handful now and we're hiring! http://www.pof.com/careers http://www.pof.com/careers
  - citricsquid 15y ago
    No, they have a jobs page (http://www.pof.com/careers/ http://www.pof.com/careers/) and it lists director of technology. Another user posted above an inc article saying that he had 4 employees in 2009 and planned for 30, so maybe he has 30 now!
- ams6110 15y ago
  Also from that link: No built in components from ASP are used. Everything is written from scratch. Nothing is more complex than a simple if then and for loops. and... In the process of getting rid of ASP.NET repeaters and instead uses the append string thing or response.write. If you are doing over a million page views a day just write out the code to spit it out to the screen. I think this goes a long way to explaining how this is all running on IIS on a seemingly "small" hardware infrastructure. Last company I worked for reimplemented a "classic" ASP app which was mostly in-page SQL statements calling stored procedures, with Response.Writes building the HTML. The new implementation, in ASP.NET, used .NET components, an ORM, an elegantly abstracted object model, agile methodologies, etc. It was slower than sludge compared to the old app.
  - boyter 15y ago
    Had the same experience. You can get too carried away with abstractions in .NET. Where I work it was the norm to have multiple layers, abstractions, frameworks etc... A consequence of this was 30 minute build times etc... I think the people working on the stuff initially just wanted to play with every language feature under the sun. I ditched it all for a few simple layers (mostly MVC with LINQ to SQL) and as a result the application takes 2 seconds to compile, is very fast at runtime, and has no magic going and is easy enough you could hand it over to a junior developer to maintain.
peterwwillis 15y ago
So around 2.3k HPS monthly average. Assuming an average peak is 10 times that, 23k HPS seems a little little high but doable for a handful of servers (after load balancing and caching come into play). One note says "everything is dynamic, nothing is static" which sounds weird if they're using Akamai for anything but images. Images are claimed to be served at 100K HPS, which would be difficult for a handful of servers, especially with the dynamic content on top of it. It comes down to caching and hardware as usual.
- jaylevitt 15y ago
  You can do a lot more than asset caching with Akamai; they have stuff from "edge-side includes" all the way up to your own J2EE at the edge.
gdhillon 15y ago
Does anyone know the technology stack used for front and backend by POF?
- GFischer 15y ago
  It used to be based on IIS and ASP.NET (one of the biggest Microsoft success stories on those technologies). Edit: from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlentyofFish http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlentyofFish they used ASP.NET 2.0 and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 in 2007.
  - Hexteque 15y ago
    To be fair, its one of the biggest success stories that you know of. In interviewing for a CIO from some top companies, I was a little surprised to discover how many large sites you are using on a daily basis that are .Net with IIS / SQL. Personally, where I work, we have been very very successful with our MS stack. We have been in the Inc 5000 for the last 4 years and in the Inc 500 (top 20) 1 year.
  - gdhillon 15y ago
    Thanks. I just checked their pages are .aspx which is Microsoft ASP.Net.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
d3ad1ysp0rk 15y ago
I will be more impressed when they stop storing plain text passwords.
- boonez123 15y ago
  It's almost as impressive as the UI.
  - ww520 15y ago
    Another point in function over design, just like Craigslist.
    - danilocampos 15y ago
      Not really. Contrast the cluttered mess that is PoF to OkCupid, which has decent usability and reasonable information architecture. OkC's design is also better at extracting the right information from more users more consistently, meaning the resulting corpus of data is more complete. Which makes for a better product, since it's easier to find the sort of people you'd be into. PoF is successful in spite of its questionable design, not because of it.
      - loceng 15y ago
        Personality and feeling matter.
      - reinhardt 15y ago
        Sounds like a worse is better case study.
        basseq 15y ago
        Take all this with a grain of salt, as I'm about to get vague and handwave-y. According to some article I read [citation needed], the fact that their interface is crap actually drives more pageviews. E.g., that profile pictures are distorted is searches actually encourages people to click through to profiles to see better-looking photos. So poor usability actually is a feature. Which comes back to the old argument about advertising-driven revenue models resulting in poor user experiences, since the "user" from a revenue model is the advertiser and YOU'RE the product.
jedberg 15y ago
I'm not sure I believe this and here is why: At one point Highscalability covered the reddit architecture, but he didn't actually talk to anyone at reddit about it, and got a lot of it wrong. I tried to contact him and get it fixed, but he never responded to me. So I have to wonder where these numbers are coming from.
- citricsquid 15y ago
  Probably here http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2011/12/27/32-billion-images-a-month/ http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2011/12/27/32-billion-imag... which he cites in the article ;)
- toddh 15y ago
  Jedberg, I'm sorry I didn't respond, but I don't have a record of getting an email. Corrections are always welcome. A lot of articles are summaries from multiple sources, so they aren't made up (I'm not sure how I would even do that), and the sources are always referenced somewhere. But of course I could screw up. And I don't make an effort to contact people anymore because seldom is there a contact point and they rarely respond or follow up. Which is why I rely so heavily on existing materials like blog posts, presentations, slide decks, forum threads, and whatever else I can find.
  - jedberg 15y ago
    I tried to contact you through the form on your site. Regardless, I wasn't accusing you of making things up, I was just stating that sometimes you don't use very reliable sources (like blog posts that may also be unreliable). I don't work at reddit anymore, so I can't speak to their setup, but if you ever need help with an article on Netflix, let me know!
    - JanezStupar 15y ago
      Do an article on Netflix! NAO!
      - 15y ago
ck2 15y ago
He used to post on webmasterworld as he was developing the site. Some interesting stuff. And it's on IIS which blew my mind. webmasterworld.com/profilev4.cgi?action=view&member=markus007
- henrikschroder 15y ago
  > And it's on IIS which blew my mind. I think that says a lot more about you than about IIS. It's mature software, why wouldn't it perform on par with other mature webservers?
  - 27182818284 15y ago
    It isn't to say a lot of people thought it was impossible, but it is just very unheard of. Anecdotally, most of the people I know hadn't heard of it either. Slashdot, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc were the very large sites talking about what they used over the years and it was all about the open source stuff like Apache, PHP, etc. Then I found out, on HN, that POF used IIS and it was mind blowing. You would think even Microsoft would promote its successful uses more like that. Until POF, I too had assumed IIS was only for 1,000 to 50,000 enterprisey setups. I didn't think it couldn't be used per se, but I just hadn't ever heard of it being used that way until POF either.
    - eftpotrm 15y ago
      Hotmail, for one, moved to IIS from its bought-in FreeBSD roots many years ago.
    - ck2 15y ago
      Here's another mind-blower: enom runs the largest IIS server farm in the world (at least they did up to a few years ago) Can't find a direct link but I remember that little factoid because it surprised me. I don't mean customer servers sold as services, this was before then, it's their own server network.
      - philjr 15y ago
DevX101 15y ago
Frind was making $10 million USD per year when he had 1.2 billion page views. If his revenue scales directly to pageviews (which I think it does), he should be bringing in about $50M per year. Not bad.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
gopi 15y ago
I know Markus from good 'ol webmasterworld days when he was a active affiliate marketer. He is really a bright guy and POF's initial growth was mainly from SEO (until the network effects kicked in). If i remember correctly until a few years ago the site ran on a single webserver and db server!.
badclient 15y ago
So he makes about a tenth of a penny per pageview?
elchief 15y ago
I interviewed with them in their Vancouver offices. They are near the top of the Harbour Centre downtown, and have a crazy beautiful view of North Vancouver and the mountains. I would say there were about 15 people in the office at the time (1.5 years ago) Markus is a slightly weird Rain Man kinda guy, but is obviously very smart. A bit smug, though likely deservedly. He has a hot girlfriend, that is the head of marketing or something. It was a three on one interview, which isn't very welcoming. No whiteboard, no code writing. Kinda glad I didn't get it, actually.
rsanheim 15y ago
...and yet the site is one of the most unusable, unfriendly, and unattractive dating sites out there.
- spitfire 15y ago
  It doesn't matter if the site is unattractive, as long as the users are.
- dhughes 15y ago
  Add to that a total bitch-fest, cliques, heavy-handed mods.
sayemm 15y ago
Love his post on how he got it all started: "How I Started a Dating Empire" - http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/06/14/how-i-started-an-empire/ http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/06/14/how-i-started-a...
jaequery 15y ago
i dont know how he did it with a name like plentyoffish and to do it all by himself, let alone from canada. that man has skills.

86 points by yarapavan 15y ago

A more detailed post on PlentyOfFish architecture - http://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture http://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture

citricsquid 15y ago

"POF has one single employee: the founder and CEO Markus Frind. Makes up to $10 million a year on Google ads working only two hours a day. 30+ Million Hits a Day (500 - 600 pages per second)." I find this more interesting than the parent article; although it seems clear hiring more people helped them expand (and handle that expansion) a lot, a single employee/founder doing that much is crazy impressive. From: http://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture http://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture

saurik 15y ago
You might enjoy this article, then (I read it in a physical copy of Inc. a few years ago, and remember really liking it). http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/and-the-money-comes-rolling-in.html http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/and-the-money-comes-rol...
blurbytree 15y ago
...and anyone here can make a comfortable income from adsense. Do not believe the hivemind here that advertising based income isn't possible.
- citricsquid 15y ago
  Not sure your point, I make my income from advertising (well company does and pays me, same thing right?) my fascination was with the single employee part.
  - blurbytree 15y ago
    Oh definitely. I was just pointing out that it's a very viable model for anyone here to copy, contrary to the advice of most here.
- chc 15y ago
  Nobody's saying it's impossible — just that like many other possible sources of revenue, such as lottery tickets, it isn't very dependable. If you're able to get 200 million pageviews a day, all sorts of avenues for making money are open to you. For most prospective businesses, though, "I will get 200 million pageviews a day and be able to maintain it practically by myself" is not a very safe assumption to make.
rokhayakebe 15y ago
Does POF still have one employee?
- rfolstad 15y ago
  Nope we've got a handful now and we're hiring! http://www.pof.com/careers http://www.pof.com/careers
- citricsquid 15y ago
  No, they have a jobs page (http://www.pof.com/careers/ http://www.pof.com/careers/) and it lists director of technology. Another user posted above an inc article saying that he had 4 employees in 2009 and planned for 30, so maybe he has 30 now!
ams6110 15y ago
Also from that link: No built in components from ASP are used. Everything is written from scratch. Nothing is more complex than a simple if then and for loops. and... In the process of getting rid of ASP.NET repeaters and instead uses the append string thing or response.write. If you are doing over a million page views a day just write out the code to spit it out to the screen. I think this goes a long way to explaining how this is all running on IIS on a seemingly "small" hardware infrastructure. Last company I worked for reimplemented a "classic" ASP app which was mostly in-page SQL statements calling stored procedures, with Response.Writes building the HTML. The new implementation, in ASP.NET, used .NET components, an ORM, an elegantly abstracted object model, agile methodologies, etc. It was slower than sludge compared to the old app.
- boyter 15y ago
  Had the same experience. You can get too carried away with abstractions in .NET. Where I work it was the norm to have multiple layers, abstractions, frameworks etc... A consequence of this was 30 minute build times etc... I think the people working on the stuff initially just wanted to play with every language feature under the sun. I ditched it all for a few simple layers (mostly MVC with LINQ to SQL) and as a result the application takes 2 seconds to compile, is very fast at runtime, and has no magic going and is easy enough you could hand it over to a junior developer to maintain.

peterwwillis 15y ago

So around 2.3k HPS monthly average. Assuming an average peak is 10 times that, 23k HPS seems a little little high but doable for a handful of servers (after load balancing and caching come into play). One note says "everything is dynamic, nothing is static" which sounds weird if they're using Akamai for anything but images. Images are claimed to be served at 100K HPS, which would be difficult for a handful of servers, especially with the dynamic content on top of it. It comes down to caching and hardware as usual.

jaylevitt 15y ago
You can do a lot more than asset caching with Akamai; they have stuff from "edge-side includes" all the way up to your own J2EE at the edge.

gdhillon 15y ago

Does anyone know the technology stack used for front and backend by POF?

GFischer 15y ago
It used to be based on IIS and ASP.NET (one of the biggest Microsoft success stories on those technologies). Edit: from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlentyofFish http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlentyofFish they used ASP.NET 2.0 and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 in 2007.
- Hexteque 15y ago
  To be fair, its one of the biggest success stories that you know of. In interviewing for a CIO from some top companies, I was a little surprised to discover how many large sites you are using on a daily basis that are .Net with IIS / SQL. Personally, where I work, we have been very very successful with our MS stack. We have been in the Inc 5000 for the last 4 years and in the Inc 500 (top 20) 1 year.
- gdhillon 15y ago
  Thanks. I just checked their pages are .aspx which is Microsoft ASP.Net.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

d3ad1ysp0rk 15y ago

I will be more impressed when they stop storing plain text passwords.

boonez123 15y ago
It's almost as impressive as the UI.
- ww520 15y ago
  Another point in function over design, just like Craigslist.
  - danilocampos 15y ago
    Not really. Contrast the cluttered mess that is PoF to OkCupid, which has decent usability and reasonable information architecture. OkC's design is also better at extracting the right information from more users more consistently, meaning the resulting corpus of data is more complete. Which makes for a better product, since it's easier to find the sort of people you'd be into. PoF is successful in spite of its questionable design, not because of it.
    - loceng 15y ago
      Personality and feeling matter.
    - reinhardt 15y ago
      Sounds like a worse is better case study.
      - basseq 15y ago
        Take all this with a grain of salt, as I'm about to get vague and handwave-y. According to some article I read [citation needed], the fact that their interface is crap actually drives more pageviews. E.g., that profile pictures are distorted is searches actually encourages people to click through to profiles to see better-looking photos. So poor usability actually is a feature. Which comes back to the old argument about advertising-driven revenue models resulting in poor user experiences, since the "user" from a revenue model is the advertiser and YOU'RE the product.

jedberg 15y ago

I'm not sure I believe this and here is why: At one point Highscalability covered the reddit architecture, but he didn't actually talk to anyone at reddit about it, and got a lot of it wrong. I tried to contact him and get it fixed, but he never responded to me. So I have to wonder where these numbers are coming from.

citricsquid 15y ago
Probably here http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2011/12/27/32-billion-images-a-month/ http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2011/12/27/32-billion-imag... which he cites in the article ;)
toddh 15y ago
Jedberg, I'm sorry I didn't respond, but I don't have a record of getting an email. Corrections are always welcome. A lot of articles are summaries from multiple sources, so they aren't made up (I'm not sure how I would even do that), and the sources are always referenced somewhere. But of course I could screw up. And I don't make an effort to contact people anymore because seldom is there a contact point and they rarely respond or follow up. Which is why I rely so heavily on existing materials like blog posts, presentations, slide decks, forum threads, and whatever else I can find.
- jedberg 15y ago
  I tried to contact you through the form on your site. Regardless, I wasn't accusing you of making things up, I was just stating that sometimes you don't use very reliable sources (like blog posts that may also be unreliable). I don't work at reddit anymore, so I can't speak to their setup, but if you ever need help with an article on Netflix, let me know!
  - JanezStupar 15y ago
    Do an article on Netflix! NAO!
    - 15y ago

ck2 15y ago

He used to post on webmasterworld as he was developing the site. Some interesting stuff. And it's on IIS which blew my mind. webmasterworld.com/profilev4.cgi?action=view&member=markus007

henrikschroder 15y ago
> And it's on IIS which blew my mind. I think that says a lot more about you than about IIS. It's mature software, why wouldn't it perform on par with other mature webservers?
- 27182818284 15y ago
  It isn't to say a lot of people thought it was impossible, but it is just very unheard of. Anecdotally, most of the people I know hadn't heard of it either. Slashdot, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc were the very large sites talking about what they used over the years and it was all about the open source stuff like Apache, PHP, etc. Then I found out, on HN, that POF used IIS and it was mind blowing. You would think even Microsoft would promote its successful uses more like that. Until POF, I too had assumed IIS was only for 1,000 to 50,000 enterprisey setups. I didn't think it couldn't be used per se, but I just hadn't ever heard of it being used that way until POF either.
  - eftpotrm 15y ago
    Hotmail, for one, moved to IIS from its bought-in FreeBSD roots many years ago.
  - ck2 15y ago
    Here's another mind-blower: enom runs the largest IIS server farm in the world (at least they did up to a few years ago) Can't find a direct link but I remember that little factoid because it surprised me. I don't mean customer servers sold as services, this was before then, it's their own server network.
    - philjr 15y ago

DevX101 15y ago

Frind was making $10 million USD per year when he had 1.2 billion page views. If his revenue scales directly to pageviews (which I think it does), he should be bringing in about $50M per year. Not bad.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

gopi 15y ago

I know Markus from good 'ol webmasterworld days when he was a active affiliate marketer. He is really a bright guy and POF's initial growth was mainly from SEO (until the network effects kicked in). If i remember correctly until a few years ago the site ran on a single webserver and db server!.

badclient 15y ago

So he makes about a tenth of a penny per pageview?

elchief 15y ago

I interviewed with them in their Vancouver offices. They are near the top of the Harbour Centre downtown, and have a crazy beautiful view of North Vancouver and the mountains. I would say there were about 15 people in the office at the time (1.5 years ago) Markus is a slightly weird Rain Man kinda guy, but is obviously very smart. A bit smug, though likely deservedly. He has a hot girlfriend, that is the head of marketing or something. It was a three on one interview, which isn't very welcoming. No whiteboard, no code writing. Kinda glad I didn't get it, actually.

rsanheim 15y ago

...and yet the site is one of the most unusable, unfriendly, and unattractive dating sites out there.

spitfire 15y ago
It doesn't matter if the site is unattractive, as long as the users are.
dhughes 15y ago
Add to that a total bitch-fest, cliques, heavy-handed mods.

sayemm 15y ago

Love his post on how he got it all started: "How I Started a Dating Empire" - http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/06/14/how-i-started-an-empire/ http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/06/14/how-i-started-a...

jaequery 15y ago

i dont know how he did it with a name like plentyoffish and to do it all by himself, let alone from canada. that man has skills.