We spoke to Steven Titren, co-founder of DigiReward, who shared his experience of using Hidora PaaS and explained how DigiReward reduced its hosting spend by 5x compared to AWS.
Simply put, DigiReward was previously hosted on AWS. The founders decided to move to Hidora for the following reasons:
- Pricing (cheaper and simpler than on AWS) ;
- Better level of support;
- Vertical and horizontal scalability ;
- Better performance.
About DigiReward
DigiReward is a French startup that was founded 2 years ago. The DigiReward team has developed an application to reward members of a community.
Initially launched as an application to reward users for their actions on social networks (likes, shares, comments on Facebook, Twitter and Youtube) and on some physical media (QR Code scanning, geolocation…) DigiReward has quickly become a true multi-channel reward solution, able to engage users on many physical and digital media.
This application helps businesses increase user engagement across social media, websites, apps, point of sale, newsletters and more by offering an innovative reward system.
The company’s fans and customers can turn their actions (purchases, likes, reviews, etc.) into points. With these bonuses, the user can access a virtual shop offering goodies, discount codes, physical products and invitations to events. This is a kind of virtual currency that the user can exchange for real products.
DigiReward helps businesses build their community and increase the number of happy and loyal customers.
What is the architecture of your application on Hidora?
Today we have a simple LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). To build a new, more scalable version of the application, we added Reddis and MongoDB. In addition, we enabled high availability for our production application by adding an additional load balancer and a PHP web server.
What problems did you have before migrating to Hidora? What solution did you use before?
Before moving to Hidora, we were using the AWS hosting solution. The big problem with Amazon is the poor customer support and the very high prices. You have to pay for instances, public IP addresses, traffic, backups, etc.
Steven TITREN
co-founder of DigiReward
We paid 5 times more on AWS than we do now on Hidora. The price difference is huge and we are very happy with our current hosting bill.
Why did you move to Hidora?
For all applications, every expense is important. We paid 5 times more on AWS than we do now on Hidora. The price difference is huge and we are very happy with our current hosting bill.
Especially considering the fact that Hidora provides us with an exceptional level of support. We are very happy with the individual approach we have taken as a customer.
In terms of performance, on AWS we had a fairly large instance and when we switched to Hidora we started using very small instances, but the performance stayed the same.
One of the main differences is the way Hidora charges us: at AWS, we were charged according to VM resource limits (RAM and CPU). We had to order more resources than we really needed to handle the traffic peaks. These things changed when we migrated applications to Hidora. Unlike AWS, Hidora charges us for resource usage, but not for limits. We use the same types of machines, but it costs us less because of this nice billing policy.
Why did you move to Hidora?
For all applications, every expense is important. We paid 5 times more on AWS than we do now on Hidora. The price difference is huge and we are very happy with our current hosting bill.
Especially considering the fact that Hidora provides us with an exceptional level of support. We are very happy with the individual approach we have taken as a customer.
In terms of performance, on AWS we had a fairly large instance and when we switched to Hidora we started using very small instances, but the performance stayed the same.
One of the main differences is the way Hidora charges us: at AWS, we were charged according to VM resource limits (RAM and CPU). We had to order more resources than we really needed to handle the traffic peaks. These things changed when we migrated applications to Hidora. Unlike AWS, Hidora charges us for resource usage, but not for limits. We use the same types of machines, but it costs us less because of this nice billing policy.
“Today, I am very satisfied with the cost of Hidora’s hosting services, the level of support and the user-friendliness of the tool, which every developer on my team can use without any training.”
Do you use horizontal auto-scaling in Hidora?
I consider auto-scaling to be an essential feature for seasonal businesses. Since most of our customers are seasonal businesses (retail and businesses that have a lot of traffic during the holidays), traffic varies from month to month. When traffic is low, we don’t need many resources to cover our needs. So we don’t have to worry about not being able to cover the next traffic peak of millions of connections. Without scalability, we would have to overpay for a large server, which we would not use most of the time. Hidora is a very simple solution to create a scalable architecture.
How do you use pre-prod environments? Do you stop pre-prod environments when they are not needed to save money?
We have 2 pre-production environments: one for the team and one for new clients. We schedule the internal pre-production environment to be active from 8am and to end when the last developer finishes his work. This saves us money, as we don’t use it overnight.
We also use pre-prod environments on Hidora to demonstrate our application to potential customers. In this case, we only start the pre-prod environments for 2 hours and this saves us a lot of money.
How did your development and operational processes change after the migration to Hidora?
Hidora is very easy to use with a simple dashboard where our developers simply create instances, compared to the complex interface of AWS. After migrating to Hidora, our sysadmins have started to save significant time on routine tasks such as creating environments, managing databases, optimising performance and configuring application servers. Currently, we are also working on implementing a new CI/CD pipeline using Gitlab on Hidora.
Could you please describe your experience with Hidora?
Today, I am very satisfied with the cost of Hidora’s hosting services, the level of support and the user-friendliness of the tool, which every developer on my team can use without any training.
I also want to mention that the documentation published by Jelastic covers the most important points. But if the documentation does not cover my problem, the Hidora team answers all my questions. I know that I will always get an individual and personal approach.
