Migrating Jófogás to AWS with Cheppers

Jófogás’s web, application, caching, database, and search tiers ran entirely in a third-party colocation data center operated by the same vendor that had also built the site’s underlying engine. That arrangement left the company dependent on the provider for infrastructure changes. Scaling required buying additional compute capacity, infrastructure costs had risen above the company’s expectations, and the network was difficult to monitor and modify. Hardware refresh cycles and facility fees consumed a disproportionate share of the IT budget, and the team could not adopt modern patterns like managed databases or content delivery network–based edge security. Bot and scraping traffic further strained the existing web application firewall, which offered limited protection and almost no visibility into what was happening on the network.

As the contract with the provider neared its end, Jófogás had no extension or grace period available. Before the technical work could start, Jófogás spent about 5 months assessing options and securing leadership support for the migration. That left only a few months to relocate the production environment before the provider shut down the existing service. Missing the deadline would have created ongoing operational risk for the site.

Jófogás chose Cheppers based on a previous working relationship and its structured guidance. “The level of support we got, and the way Cheppers held our hands during the process, gave us a clear path through the migration,” says Zoran Heinczinger, chief operations officer at Jófogás. Cheppers built a six-account governance foundation on AWS Control Tower to establish and govern a multiple-account AWS environment, with Management and Hub accounts, Production and Test spoke accounts, and dedicated Log Archive and Audit accounts.

AWS Transit Gateway, used to connect Amazon Virtual Private Clouds, AWS accounts, and on-premises networks to a single gateway, connected the Production and Test spoke networks through the Hub account and maintained connectivity to the data center during the migration. Amazon Route 53, a reliable and cost-effective way to route users to internet applications, provided internal Domain Name System servers across accounts through private hosted zones. Virtual machines were rehosted using AWS Transform MGN to migrate and improve on-premises and cloud-based applications, while PostgreSQL databases were migrated to Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), which is a simple-to-manage relational database service optimized for total cost of ownership. Cheppers used AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) to securely migrate its databases with ongoing change data capture to keep the source and target databases synchronized and minimize cutover downtime.

To reduce bot and scraping traffic, Cheppers fronted the public site with Amazon CloudFront to securely deliver content with low latency and high transfer speeds and paired it with AWS WAF to protect web applications from common exploits. Cheppers configured IP allowlisting, AWS Managed Rules, and Autonomous System Number–based filtering to block unwanted traffic before it can reach the application. The Partner also provided post-go-live support with daily standups in the first week, helping the Jófogás team become familiar with the new environment.

Following the migration, Jófogás’s entire production environment was running on AWS, and the previous colocation data center was decommissioned on schedule. The company cut its 3-year total cost of ownership by roughly 30 percent. Average server-side load times fell from approximately 800–1,000 milliseconds to 100–200 milliseconds, making server-side performance up to six times faster. According to the Chrome User Experience Report, mobile load times for the homepage and listing opener also improved from approximately 1.7–1.9 seconds to 0.9–1.1 seconds. More aggressive caching drove much of the improvement, leaving most remaining load time attributable to client-side rendering.

Bot registrations fell about 98 percent, from 20–30 per day down to 6 to 10 per month, freeing capacity equivalent to two full-time employees for other work. Jófogás also saw blocked phishing attempts fall from 107 during the comparable period in the previous month to 10 following the AWS migration. Useful visits to the site rose from 30 percent to 72 percent of overall traffic, while a marketplace vendor’s 5,000-product catalog that previously took over half an hour to import could be completed within a few minutes. “Without AWS and Cheppers, we wouldn’t have had the resources, the knowledge, the experience, or the focus to achieve this,” says Heinczinger.

Cheppers is a Hungary-based consultancy specializing in cloud migration and modernization for small and midsize businesses.