Novel Cave is a fan translation site created by a handful of Japanese web novel readers that got tired of most translation groups’ slow release schedule. Unlike most translation groups, the Novel Cave crew are enthusiasts with day jobs that do this as a hobby rather than for the money. That means they can afford to pay more for a fast website and don’t have to bombard their audience with popup ads and beg for Patreon donations.
What they needed
The Novel Cave team required a simple site that could handle a potential of 2.5 million visitors a month that can integrate with their planned ad network partner while remaining fast to load. They could afford to set up a high capacity server with plenty of room for growth without worrying about whether or not the hobby project would become a household name.
What we did
We set up a novel site with capabilities for multiple languages, memberships and e-commerce capabilities to be added in case the project grows to be a serious business and set the site up on a solid server capable of handling large traffic loads.
Unlike most of our clients, we did not set up a reverse-proxy CDN to lighten the caching load on the origin server as Novel Cave had plans to integrate with Ezoic, an ad network notorious for being tricky to set up for new publishers with its own front-facing CDN. Instead, we set up a traditional pull-zone that will pair nicely with Ezoic’s network and fill in the caching gaps.
Planned expansion
Because Novel Cave began as a hobby site, there was no guarantee it would ever expand beyond a simple database to read your translated novels so the publicly available features were always minimal. That said, features were set up on the back end in case