As a team of developers, we're always intrigued to learn about how people use our service. We try our best to reach out to our customers and see how best we can help make their lives easier. We recently got in touch with the great guys at Zibbet to learn more about how they use Cloud 66.
For those who don't know, Zibbet is a marketplace for awesome handmade and vintage products. They take a firm stance against resellers on the site - which sets them apart from a marketplace like Etsy. When Etsy changed their policy to allow resellers last year, many merchants jumped ship to Zibbet. So many in fact that Zibbet servers struggled to stay up! They previously hosted on Heroku, and recently migrated over to Cloud 66. We spoke with Pavel Kotlyar, the person in charge of Zibbet tech, to find out more.
How did you originally host Zibbet?
Heroku, 5PX (5 passengers per dyno) for web, 1PX for worker + http://hirefire.io to auto scale in case of unexpected traffic + Heroku Postgres Baku.
What was your reasoning for moving to Cloud 66?
Our application was a brand new rebuild of our old web site, but unfortunately we did not have enough time before the release to optimise it well enough in terms of memory consumption. We also had quite large data to manage, so 6GB RAM on Heroku with 5 processes per dyno was not good for us and we often got errors on Heroku related to memory overflow during peak traffic. We can’t afford to have 1 process per dyno and pay for 25 PXes… So the main reason - we needed more powerful servers with more RAM but at the same time we needed the same simplicity of server operation, setup, scale and management. We don’t have a DevOps or server admin in the team and our developers really like to focus on application development rather then on servers management and maintenance.
How did the move affect your monthly hosting bill?
It was a pleasurable surprise - we’ve got much more powerful servers with Digital Ocean and Cloud 66 and our monthly cost literally became 50% cheaper than on Heroku with Heroku Postrges.
How did you go about migrating to Cloud 66?
We had some small issues related to Procfile settings as for example Redis should not be there, because it automatically running with Sidekiq and passenger already installed in the stack. But overall it was very easy and the support was very helpful as well as the documentation. The migration of the database, thanks to Cloud 66 documentation was smooth and easy as well, we’ve migrated 7Gb database from Heroku and imported it to our Postgres server in 15 mins following the steps from the docs. So the downtime was about 20 mins including DNS changes.
Did you experience any issues with the move?
We had very few issues and as mentioned, it was Procfile settings and some issues related to our CI deploy configuration settings. I was able to run our Heroku configuration very quickly.
Is there anything else you'd like to add?
We are happy customers, so far so good. We even don’t need the support anymore since everything is working just fine. A few days ago we decided to rebuild our search with Elasticsearch and with Cloud 66 we can setup Elasticsearch server with one click, this is awesome!
We're really happy to be working with the great people at Zibbet, and always love to hear from our customers. If you're working on something cool and would like us to share it, get in touch with us!