Security, performance and much lower costs
WorldAtlas is a content-heavy platform with a global reach of millions of monthly visitors. After a migration to AWS failed to deliver, they turned to ElasticScale for help. The result: a future-proof setup, drastically lower costs, and a team that can finally breathe and build the future of the platform.
Challenge
WorldAtlas launched in 1994, the early days of the internet. Today it’s one of the largest publishing resources in geography and other topics. Security issues mounted when a period of rapid growth was followed by a failed migration to AWS. All the while, crawlers and bots hit hard, the legacy single server reached end of life and hosting costs grew fast. It was time for real infrastructure firepower.
Solution
We migrated WorldAtlas to the ES Foundation platform, running on ECS Fargate with Cloudflare Zero Trust. A mirrored staging environment was created to thoroughly test the transition before going live. The entire process was transparent and smooth - right down to shared to-do lists and a dedicated Slack channel.
Alex Jeensma of ElasticScale: ‘Digital infrastructure is never a one size fits all. The goal is a technical setup that matches the context and needs of the company. WorldAtlas needs an infrastructure that provides stability and security every second of the day. With ES Foundation we made that business priority a technical reality.’
Results
The digital infrastructure of WorldAtlas is as global and scalable as their content, running on a secure, cloud-native setup that just works, with the costs way below the level of their initial single server setup.
- Zero downtime during and after migration
- Cloud costs cut by over 70% (monthly spend from $15k to $4 – trending towards $2k)
- Stronger security and control with Cloudflare and Zero Trust
- Less hassle for the team: 90% decrease of production time
- Peace of mind: no more SEO scares
Review
Marek Brys, CEO of WorldAtlas: ’ElasticScale gave us the best possible digital infrastructure. We experience way lower infrastructure costs, our performance and security have improved enormously, and things have become so much easier for our team. It just works.’
‘I would recommend every SaaS company to give ElasticScale a call. Our team used to need multiple tools and setups - now everything runs in one environment. One click and we’re up.’
‘Earlier, when we tried to move from a single-server setup to the cloud, we ended up with growing complexity and high recurring costs. Now we’ve finally entered the future. Our infrastructure is stable, fast and easy to use and maintain. And there wasn’t even a dip in traffic.’