TO THE NEW is a digital technology company that offers end-to-end product development services to businesses across the globe. It leverages the power of experience design, cutting-edge engineering, and cloud to build disruptive web and mobile products for organizations while assisting them on their digital transformation journey. TO THE NEW has established itself as a dynamic organization that works on breakthrough technologies and delivers mission critical mobile and web applications. It takes a deep dive into various digital advances and leverages these technologies to build winning products. TO THE NEW has an illustrious clientele, which includes large enterprises such as Time Warner Cable, Westcon, Castrol, and Samsung.

TO THE NEW was running a dynamic website built on Drupal 8, but it faced challenges like poor page load time, slow response time and other related performance issues. This resulted in a compromised user experience. Website load time is a critical but often ignored component by online businesses. It is also a major contributor to page abandonment. We needed a quick response website to deliver an enhanced user experience and achieve higher conversions. Our aim was to get the website to load in less than 3 seconds. We also needed to ensure that all our content was easily accessible, with maximum website uptime to serve a large number of users. While TO THE NEW implemented some measures internally to deal with these challenges, the inherent lack of capabilities of the existing cloud partner led to a deadlock. We needed a better hosting provider. This is where Alibaba Cloud came into the picture as a reliable and cost-effective “host” for TO THE NEW.

Alibaba Cloud is one of the leading cloud service providers in the world, with a large global footprint and strong presence in Asia. They provided us with an easy to use management console and well-documented APIs to access their hosting platform. They offered us flexibility regarding choice of operating system, programming language, web application platform, database, and other essential services. We paid for the storage, compute power and resources as per usage without any long-term contracts or vendor lock-ins. The Alibaba Cloud platform enabled our team to set up an environment with the hardware capacity aligned to our data processing requirements. This led to optimal hardware utilization at a lower cost. Our migration to the Alibaba Cloud environment improved the performance of our website manifold, with the flexibility of their platform accommodating dynamic resource needs. Furthermore, their infrastructure offered us a robust cloud solution that provided maximum resource reliability with unflinching support for concurrent users. This resulted in an overall enhanced user experience with minimal downtime. Alibaba Cloud integrates high levels of end-to-end security and data protection into all its products and services.

Products used: Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Object Storage Service (OSS), Elastic Compute Service (ECS) Alibaba Cloud architecture addressed our concerns for the main website while maintaining a robust storage volume for FTP, server, and code. It also provided a daily automatic backup feature with a retention period of one month. Alibaba Cloud OSS is used to store static content like migration and MySQL backup. ECS is used to serve the main website. VPC adds security to the architecture by putting all servers into a private network. We are using VRouter which is like a subnet used to create instances in a particular CIDR. Elastic IP safeguards your IP address in case the server dies out or is terminated. We are using MySQL database in the same ECS instance that is used for serving our website, and Redis as a caching service that is also installed in that particular ECS instance.

"Alibaba Cloud provided us a comprehensive and tailor-made hosting solution for our needs, along with a robust and stable architecture that radically reduced the load speed of our website and supported thousands of concurrent users with minimal response time." - Raman Mittal, VP Sales & Marketing, TO THE NEW