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How display.io runs billions of real-time ad auctions on bare metal built for It

About display.io

display.io is an ad network and supply-side platform that monetizes in-app traffic for publishers worldwide. Every time a user scrolls to a monetizable placement, display.io fires a real-time auction across multiple demand sources and returns a winning ad in under 300 milliseconds. That process runs hundreds of thousands of times per second, billions of times per day.

The challenge

Real-time programmatic advertising does not tolerate latency. At peak, display.io processes roughly half a million events per second, and traffic can surge tenfold within a single hour. Every missed event is missed publisher revenue, and a slow ad simply does not get seen.

Consistent delivery across the US, Asia, Europe, and beyond added another layer of complexity. An ad loading in ten seconds earns zero viewability. Zero viewability means advertisers stop paying.

Before Servers.com by Nexcess, the team was running on a provider that could not keep pace. Hardware was not configured for real-time ad serving at scale. The unit economics, measured in cost per ad request, were unsustainable. And when something needed attention, the account manager took up to a week to respond.

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"I was messaging our account manager and getting an answer within a week. Sometimes they just forgot to answer me entirely."

The solution

display.io migrated to Servers.com by Nexcess, moving workloads onto bare metal servers purpose-configured for real-time programmatic advertising.

The team gained two scaling levers working together. Vertical scaling through faster processors and optimized storage pushed significantly more throughput per server. Horizontal scaling distributed workloads across machines to keep the system resilient under load. Together, they brought cost per ad request down by at least 30 percent, with savings of up to 2x on specific server configurations.

Servers.com's global data center footprint addressed the latency problem directly. Auction performance is now consistent regardless of where the user is located, keeping viewability metrics strong and advertiser confidence intact.

When campaigns break, extended log retention lets the team search historical data faster to find and resolve issues. And instead of waiting on email, support conversations now happen on Slack in five to ten minutes.

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"We feel that Servers.com is genuinely interested in us as a customer and as a partner. That's a drastic difference from what we had before."

Key results

  • 30%+ reduction in cost per ad request served

  • Up to 2x savings on specific server configurations

  • Sub-300ms auction latency maintained consistently across global markets

  • Capacity to absorb 10x traffic spikes within minutes

  • Support response time reduced from 7 days (email) to under 10 minutes (Slack)

Looking ahead

display.io is now building a machine learning layer to identify the most valuable traffic within a stream of billions of events, making prioritization decisions in tens of milliseconds. That requires purpose-configured hardware with specific processor and memory specs, which is exactly what Servers.com by Nexcess is positioned to provide.

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"Servers.com is a great and right partner to achieve the next steps for display.io."

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