Pasion Futbol & Technology for Solutions

Pasion Futbol uses Cloudflare to supercharge their website, while simultaneously reducing bandwidth costs.

Technology for Solutions develops and implements CMS Medios, an Editorial Content Management suite for web content, classifieds and benefits programs. Technology for Solutions has a strong presence in the digital media segment of Latin America and constantly looks for opportunities to develop partnerships with leading technology companies that complement their business. This study highlights Technology for Solutions client Pasion Futbol, an internet hub for professional soccer fans around the world.

Technology for Solutions Challenge With Their Client Pasion Futbol: Mitigating Costs While Improving Performance

With 9 million returning fans, pasionfutbol.com sees over 80 million page views every month. A main concern for Pasion Futbol is affordably providing a high performing, accessible website to every soccer fan. Technology for Solutions was thus tasked with finding a way to reduce costs while improving performance for their client. "We are always searching for constant optimization" said Hernan Marsili from Technology for Solutions, "Other providers have focused on distributing traffic from the USA to reduce costs, which can lead to a poor end user experience in Latin America. We also knew that a great deal of the traffic that was being paid for was coming from bots and other sites that were illegally scraping content and images from our client's website." In order to provide Pasion Futbol with the performance their users needed, Technology for Solutions was in the search for a CDN solution with a security focus and wide coverage in Latin America.

Solution: A Global, High-Performing Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Technology for Solutions found Cloudflare through their research on internet security companies and decided to integrate it directly into their CMS publication ervices. This integration gives their clients access to Cloudflare’s CDN and security suite directly from Technology for Solutions CMS.

Now, Pasion Futbol uses Cloudflare's Global CDN (Content Delivery Network) to cache and serve their content from data centers in 330 cities around the world. Five of these Data Centers are in South America, making Pasion Futbol’s website faster and quicker to load for fans by serving content from locations closer to them. This performance boost reduced Pasion Futbol’s bounce rate by over 5%, keeping users on their site longer.

The caching also helps Pasion Futbol save on bandwidth costs because requests are served directly from Cloudflare's edge without hitting Pasion Futbol's origin servers. Marsili explained "The benefits of utilizing Cloudflare were immediate. From a cost savings point of view we were able to reduce our bandwidth by over ⅓ and incremented offload by 20% which allowed us to reduce the number of servers in our infrastructure. Performance-wise, we were able to reduce the load times by more than 40% by migrating to HTTPS and HTTP/2 with Cloudflare." Plus, because Cloudflare is integrated into Technology for Solution’s CMS, Pasion Futbol can specify exactly when to invalidate specific content, providing for larger TTLs for content, and thus enjoying even more bandwidth savings. Cloudflare’s internet security not only protects Pasion Futbol’s website, but also contributes towards cost savings. By using Cloudflare's WAF (Web Application Firewall) Pasion Futbol was able to block bot traffic and illegal content scraping, preventing them from driving up bandwidth costs.