Europebet Stays Secure and Competitive Using AWS, Reduces Website Loading Time by 75%

Europebet, a licensed online gambling, roulette, and casino provider in Georgia, experienced a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and was prone to latency issues. This caused website outages and slowed down site performance. Using AWS, it strengthened its security and DDoS protection, and lowered latency by offloading all its caching. It now saves around $20,000 a month on ISP costs, has improved the customer experience, and reduced its website loading time by around 75 percent.

Europebet runs its online gambling and bookmaking platform from an on-premises data center in Georgia. The company experiences consistently high traffic, with more than 50 million daily website requests in March 2021 alone.

In 2020, its data center experienced a high level of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. The attacks caused website outages, slowed down its site performance, and degraded customer experience and loyalty. That’s when Europebet turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Europebet used infrastructure as a code to migrate the front end of its website to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure and resizable compute capacity for workloads. The company added managed DDoS protection using AWS Shield Advanced.

The team now spends less time mitigating DDoS attacks and can concentrate on improving its services. The website performs 75 percent faster than before and the company has reduced its internet service provider (ISP) costs by between $20,000 and $30,000 a month.

Using AWS Shield Advanced to Mitigate DDoS Attacks

During an overhaul of the front end of its website, Europebet’s DDoS problem became critical. “Our website redesign was a big project. We’d rewritten everything apart from our core system to launch the website, but immediately after it went live, we experienced a 184 Gbps DDoS attack,” says Sandro Kvaichadze, head of TechOps at Europebet. “It caused our ISP to take down its service in Georgia for 30 minutes.”

Europebet needed a security solution that could be easily managed and provided minimal downtime and high levels of availability. Using AWS Shield Advanced, the company can effectively protect Europebet’s services by monitoring any DDoS attempts on a centralized dashboard. “The attacks used to be 8–10 hours long, but now we can quickly spot and respond to any attacks in real time,” says Kvaichadze. “At last, we can sleep at night without worrying.”

Reducing Costs by 75% Using Amazon CloudFront

After Europebet resolved the DDoS problem, its technical team grew in confidence. The company started a project to improve its website, with the aim of speeding up services for its growing customer base.To keep a user engaged in one of its casino slot games, Europebet must load content fast—faster than its competitors. But because Europebet does not have a local point of presence (PoP) in Georgia, and was relying on its on-premises servers to host the content, latency became a longstanding challenge. As its core infrastructure is owned and operated by its parent company, a lift and shift of its entire IT stack into the cloud wasn’t an option.

To deliver a better customer experience, Europebet needed a solution that would cache its static and dynamic content faster, and take the load off its on-premises servers. The company decided to use Amazon CloudFront, a content delivery network (CDN) service that reduces latency by delivering data through globally dispersed PoPs.

When it previously suffered from latency issues, its website took 5 or 6 seconds to load. Since using AWS, Europebet loads in 1.5 seconds—around 75 percent faster—which is crucial for customer retention. “This has been great for us,” says Kvaichadze. “Our customers immediately notice how much more responsive our website is, so they stay with us for longer amounts of time.”

Europebet uses Amazon CloudFront to cache all its requests and securely deliver its content to customers with low latency and high transfer speeds. This has also lowered costs. “Before we started caching properly using AWS, we paid $30,000–$40,000 a month in ISP costs,” says Kvaichadze. “We now pay around $10,000—a reduction of up to 75 percent.”

Releasing Up to 20 Product Updates Every Day

Using AWS, Europebet has accelerated development and time to market for new content offerings, and releases product updates daily.
The company’s creative vision for its website is no longer limited by DDoS downtime and latency issues. The company can try new things. “We didn’t use as many videos as we’d have liked because we didn’t trust the website to provide a great customer experience,” says Kvaichadze. “Today we’re caching everything, from JavaScript to coding and content. It’s all happening seamlessly, and it’s integrated with our core system and content management system.”

Europebet used to update its website around 10 times a week. Since using AWS, around 20 updates are made in 24 hours. That means customers see fresh game content every time they visit the website and Europebet can stay ahead of its competitors. “We can perform automatic deployments using AWS,” says Kvaichadze. “It’s given us so much flexibility, and we’ve improved the quality of our offering as a result.”

From Uncertainty to Stability and Time to Plan for the Future

Europebet now has greater confidence in its ability to defend against DDoS events and avoid latency problems. Employees across the business have more time to plan for the future. The marketing team no longer has to prepare extra campaigns to win back customers lost during downtime, as it used to do. And the product development team is free to innovate. “Everyone feels more secure using AWS,” says Kvaichadze. “It’s given us stability and increased our team’s skills and knowledge.”

Looking to the future, Europebet plans to use AWS Direct Connect to create a dedicated network connection to AWS. This will help it avoid bottlenecks and increases in latency because network traffic remains on the AWS global network rather than going through the public internet. The company’s next goal is to expand its use of AWS into disaster recovery—and eventually to go all-in. “We hope one day to move entirely into the cloud using AWS,” says Kvaichadze. “That’s our long-term goal.”