AWS Case Study: Swiftrank

Created in 2008 by a group of Internet and travel executives, Swiftrank has grown dramatically in two short years. In one representative month, the company reports that customers from 77 countries booked hotels in 56 countries. Additionally, the company reports that traffic on its 12,000 location-based websites is growing at a rate of 20% per month.

Swiftrank initially used traditional hosting through multiple high-speed servers, but eventually searched for a solution that could better handle the increased site traffic resulting from the company’s steady growth. The company determined that Amazon Web Services (AWS) provided the best option. Graham Easton, Chief Operating Officer explains: “We chose the Amazon cloud solution primarily for speed and reliability. AWS technology provides us with cutting-edge server speed, rapid scalability, and no single point of server failure – all at a cost effective price.”

The nucleus of the AWS solution comprises Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). Other components are Amazon Elastic IP and Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (Amazon ELB). The AWS products work in conjunction with Swiftrank’s own DNS servers, which direct Web requests to the load balancers in each AWS region. Traffic is then distributed among the application servers.

Easton reports that Swiftrank “is very pleased with what we are seeing so far. Most notably, we have seen important improvements in site load speed across the globe. We enjoy the system administration aspects of AWS and improved uptime. We are also pleased with our ability to boost server power up and down instantly, as needed.”

In addition to increased site speed and scalability resulting from the AWS solution, Swiftrank sees important cost benefits. By incorporating cloud computing into its infrastructure, the company estimates that it is realizing approximately 25% cost savings over the previous server setup. Furthermore, a full-time system administrator is no longer needed solely for software updates and security patching – a significant reduction in cost.

Switching to Amazon Web Services has proven to be a very wise business decision. Easton summarizes the company's experience: “Swiftrank is fortunate to be seeing very strong growth across its network of 12,000 global websites. To meet our current traffic and usage demands and forecasts on future growth, AWS provides a full scalable hosting solution with a range of tools and a team of professionals that allows our technology team to focus as much as possible on innovation.”

To learn more, visit http://www.swiftrank.com/ .

Added February 11, 2011