Necko Helps Verbolia Deliver 4x More Traffic, 440 Million SEO Pages a Month on AWS

Verbolia’s vision is to establish itself as an essential part of an ecommerce company’s marketing stack. Its two core products help online retailers publish landing pages for multiple web and social platforms to improve SEO presence and drive higher ROAS. After it’s installed, the technology lets marketers, rather than technical teams, easily deploy new pages and optimize them for SEO. The platform then uses automation to improve the pages to ensure they are performing.

This requires a lot of compute power, and Verbolia found itself getting increasingly close to the limitations of what its on-premises infrastructure could deliver. Its hardware was slow to scale, and the company lacked the geo-localized reach it needed to serve its growing global customer base. Verbolia realized that it needed to migrate to the cloud to gain the scalability required to improve the performance of its landing page technology and to support its growth plans. A simple lift and shift would not be enough. Instead, it chose to take the opportunity to refactor its systems on AWS. But the company realized that it would need help to achieve this.

The company’s chief executive officer (CEO) Pierre-Olivier Danhaive had worked with AWS before and had received a recommendation from AWS to work with Necko, also based in Belgium, as the technical delivery partner. Danhaive’s team had a little AWS experience, but he appreciated having Necko’s technical expertise onboard to help it manage the refactoring and migration project. Necko also provided advice about the hundreds of services that AWS offers. “The team at Necko was always available to help,” says Danhaive. “It was important for us to have a local partner as we grew. Trust is important and we knew we could trust the team at Necko.”

The company also benefited from AWS credits in the early stages of the refactoring project as it built and developed a minimum viable product. “As a startup, you need to reinvent yourself all the time,” says Danhaive. “AWS credits meant we were able to implement the first version of the infrastructure and weren’t afraid to make mistakes. In the early stages, mistakes can be expensive.”

Improvements to scalability were addressed by using AWS serverless technologies, including AWS Lambda to make millions of database calls, and Amazon API Gateway to access backend services. Verbolia’s infrastructure is deployed and managed using AWS CloudFormation, which enables the company to speed up cloud provisioning with infrastructure as code (IaC). Necko deployed the company’s workloads in containers using Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). New customers were added directly onto AWS while existing customer databases were migrated to the cloud over a 12-month period. Danhaive estimates that 98 percent of the business now runs on AWS.

Verbolia uses Amazon OpenSearch Service as its core database to store the vast product catalogs of its customers. AWS Lambda makes around 500 million calls per month on Amazon OpenSearch Service and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) databases. Danhaive’s team also appreciates the auto-updating of Amazon OpenSearch Service, which is automated by AWS. Without that, it would need to commit valuable developer time to regular maintenance.

Necko recommended Amazon CloudFront as the content delivery network for serving the millions of landing pages that Verbolia publishes across multiple web and social platforms for its customers. “Amazon CloudFront is a key product for us,” says Danhaive. “The advantage it gives us is that it lets us be closer to our customers in terms of page delivery. That was difficult to achieve on premises with edge caching. Around 80 to 85 percent of our business is outside Belgium, so having the ability to deliver content globally with low latency was very important for us.”