Alley has been in business for more than 15 years now, many lifetimes ago in the fast-paced world of web technology and the evolution of the media industry. Some of the challenges in scaling digital platforms we faced back then have become table stakes for any website in 2025. As the industry has evolved and these digital platforms have borne more and more of the fully business model of media companies, we also have evolved to address a new paradigm of scalability — scaling jobs to be done, the number of different people in different roles involved, and the impact websites are expected to have on the overall organization.
Back in 2010, we had to think about people as well as technology. But the people we were thinking about were media consumers, and our goal was to keep our client’s work highly available and delivered to readers within fractions of seconds. This is no less a part of web scale in 2025, except now speed and availability are table stakes, and they’re easier to access. Since 2010, hardware performance and internet speeds have grown rapidly, while population growth has been linear, and in many of the markets we serve, closer to flat. Even as Moore’s law has faltered, horizontal scale has been easier to attain due to improvements in tooling and server virtualization — Docker, a now-ubiquitous server containerization tool, wasn’t even released until 2013. Our observation is that suboptimal code performs better on average in 2025 than similarly inefficient code would’ve performed in 2010. While search engines have emphasized and rewarded certain performance metrics in their ranking algorithms, these benchmarks can often be met quickly and inexpensively by paving over nonperformant code with caching and hardware rather than by improving the underlying systems. This is no excuse to write crappy code, of course, but it’s the truth of what internet speed can compensate for today.
Case Studies in the New Web Scale
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The broad shift from advertising to reader revenue has also impacted scalability in the past years. Ad-supported sites were relatively easy for publishers to scale; every reader got the same page, if not the same ads. This made caching simple, although highly-cached systems still have their own release-planning and cache-invalidation challenges to avoid outages during major changes. Sites supported by reader revenue tend to serve separate cached versions to different types of users; authenticated readers might even get a page generated by a webserver instead of served from cache. But faster, easier to scale servers, have mostly washed away this wrinkle.
Today, the real challenges are in scaling sites for our clients’ other constituents, especially content producers, designers, and developers. Content producers have more power than ever to customize the look and feel of sites using tools like the WordPress block editor, which in turn creates a greater need for designers to create comprehensive, flexible systems. This creates more moving pieces for developers to support, and developers these days often have to work in two ecosystems — a CMS like WordPress, and a frontend layer like React.
- Designers create modular designs, often using a tool like Figma. These designs yield flexible recipes for page-building, but designers must mind the possibility for unexpected combinations and how designs will render across many different devices.
- Developers create blocks out of these designs and create necessary code in the CMS to hydrate them as well as write frontend code to render them. Developers heed the direction of the designers as well as the writers’ and editors’ needs for efficient content management tools.
- Writers and editors now decide what each page looks like and expect the CMS and frontend to render it correctly. They may decide to change elements of the site in real time based on input from reporting tools like Parsely.
- Marketers expect their own window into the digital production process, which may come in the form of paywall software, a CDP, and analytics tools.
While scaling the raw infrastructure of websites has gotten easier over time, scaling for the people and processes that use these websites to build businesses has grown dramatically in complexity. Back in 2010, we worried more about servers but trusted that the simplicity of the work product would keep us off pager duty. Now we fully trust the servers, but have a lot more to juggle nonetheless.