New Best Buy Guide Product Cards and Commissioning of Ceph Cluster – Sprint #260 Update

In sprint #260, we expanded the Best Buy Guides with product cards, which the editors can use to better highlight recommendations and alternatives. We also commissioned a new Ceph cluster.

Productkaarten in Best Buy Guides

At the beginning of this year, we investigated how we can improve the Best Buy Guides by means of a prototype. We gained a lot of quantitative insights from that, in addition to the qualitative feedback you sent in, for which we thank you. One of the insights that this prototype has yielded is the desirability of better highlighting recommendations and alternatives in Best Buy Guides by means of a product card. After a number of additional A/B tests, it is now possible to place product cards in Best Buy Guides. This is featured in the latest BBG: Laptop Best Buy Guide – June 2023.

The product card shows a brief overview of the featured product, including specifications, an explanation from the editors and a link to the Pricewatch. New is the ‘direct click-out’ to the webshop that offers the product for the lowest (basic) price in the Pricewatch. You can still compare prices and apply any filters via the link ‘View all prices’.

New Ceph cluster commissioned

A few things have also changed in the field of hosting. For example, we have commissioned a new Ceph cluster, consisting of six Dell R650 servers, containing four 3.5TB SSDs. These servers are also equipped with a twelve-core Intel Silver Xeon and 128GB DDR4 memory. They are connected to a (new) network at 25Gbit/s, which consists of Juniper EX4650 switches with 48x 10/25Gbit/s and 8x 100Gbit/s ports.

We use this Ceph cluster to store editorial images, videos, user upload images, and VM images. In total there is now about 13TiB of data stored in 18 million objectswhich with a replication factor of 3 equates to a mere 40TiB of used space, just under half of the total capacity.

And further

• Job postings (IT jobs) are shown under certain articles and on IT Pro. These will now be hidden from subscribers as part of their ad-free experience on Tweakers.
• The ‘Now in the community’ display on the front page has been improved to show the same blocks with all screen widths.
• We paid out 250 euros to a security researcher who reported an XSS problem.