Slovak agency Blueweb don’t shy away from challenges. They overcome them with vshosting~

E-commerce specialists at Blueweb create e-shops for clients such as Klenoty Aurum, Gate, Ozeta, and Isadore Apparel. Their e-shops are renowned for their precision, quality, and modern design. They also like to make the most of the latest technological trends, a tendency that also applies to their server infrastructure. As a successful firm that provides hosting for leading companies in Slovakia and the Czech Republic, vshosting~ was the natural choice.

Before their cooperaton with vshosting~ they used a standalone solution. Blueweb had several servers allocated to them which were in turn assigned to projects according to size and traffic. As a result, there were many smaller projects on one server, a few larger ones on another, and so on. The servers were isolated from each other. Each one ran a web server, database, and all the other services. The solution was therefore unsustainable over the longer term since by definition it didn’t scale well.

Blueweb first started to experience problems when the company started to grow. With expansion came greater demands on infrastructure and on the level of technical support. One example would be the need to install special libraries at an OS server level. Another was the search for a comprehensive solution to their infrastructure issues. “As a company, we felt limited by our infrastructure at the time and we couldn’t even contemplate more complex solutions such as a managed cluster or Kubernetes,” explained Mário Keméň, Backend / DevOps of Blueweb.

That’s when they realised that they were on the cusp of a large structural change affecting the entire company. In addition, they had the chance to migrate to another hosting solution to ensure greater scalability, security, and expert guidance in the future.

In contrast to the previous solution, where they were in contact with just one single person – with the limitations in terms of knowledge and availability which that brings, with vshosting~ an entire team of experts is available to them.

Of course, as far as standard requests are concerned, vshosting~ has a ticketing system where the priority of the issue is clearly visible. “Before, one person dealt with business matters, technological planning, and urgent situations. This brought many problems with it. Now, these areas are divided among various specialists. And that is exactly what we needed.” added Keméň.

From the start of our cooperation, they went for a completely new solution: a fully administered cluster made up of 13 servers. Besides the infrastructure migration, we also upgraded several libraries to a better version (e.g. for PHP). The result is a stable, highly available solution with consistently high page load speeds across all e-shops. “We can say with certainty that the vshosting~ solution has stabilised our metrics and in the majority of cases we have improved page load times by an average of approximately 10%, according to Google Analytics,” said Keméň.

And yet in their own words, they gained more than just faster page loading times. The main benefits are an incomparably more robust and reliable system, the ability to quickly scale according to need, and the expertise of the vshosting~ support team.

Thanks to this added expertise, as Blueweb confirms, they are now able to review the outputs from their monitored systems focusing on the performance of their applications or the utilisation of resources. This helps them more accurately target critical areas. They can then subsequently optimise them, resulting in faster and more stable applications.