Auto-Scaling:
How Homeciné Solutions uses Scalingo to dynamically scale their e-commerce platform.

HomeCinéSolutions: passion and efficiency at the center of the company

At HomeCinéSolutions, everyone is passionate about hi-fi and home cinema. And this passion characterizes the entire company.

First of all because the company is 100% owned by its employees.

But also because they offer a selection of the best products, competitive prices, excellent customer service and respect for personal data, including keeping tracking scripts to a minimum.

All this with only 15 employees for a turnover of 15 million euros, half the average number of employees of competitors with the same turnover.

Voted best site specialized in image and sound by Capital magazine in 2019 and 2020, the technical team is however composed of only 2 people and 100% remote!

The problems of outsourcing and dedicated servers

Clément Joubert, CTO of HomeCinéSolutions, is in charge of the application created with Ruby on Rails in 2006 and also serving as ERP: purchasing management, transport interactions, banking, analysis and statistics, legal declarations, after-sales service, customer interactions, etc.

This application was hosted on dedicated managed servers and Clément had many problems such as :

• Communication with the outsourcing company was sub-optimal. A lot of back and forth to change any configuration parameter and long waiting times to get a response from support without sometimes finding a solution for a new need.
• The dedicated server was sized for high traffic peaks in e-commerce, such as during Black Friday. But the rest of the year these servers were under-utilized.
• And finally the use of Debian LTS which did not allow to have the latest versions of many tools: no HTTP/2 for Nginx or the impossibility to use the new versions of PostgreSQL bringing important performance and functionality gains. And let's not talk about Ruby upgrades!

That's why in 2017 Clément started testing other services. IaaS was too complicated and time-consuming to bring substantial value to the technical team. The same was true for many PaaS that did not offer enough features to bring significant time savings.

In 8 years, the management information service has only called us a few times to report attacks. When they made version updates, the application didn't always restart on its own and the recovery was laborious.

Advanced PaaS with Scalingo as a solution

In the end the choice of Clément went to Scalingo.

Firstly, because it offered the possibility of being hosted on a high-availability platform at the same price, with in particular multi-node clusters for Redis and PostgreSQL, which gave the technical team peace of mind and allowed them to make updates without any downtime.

But also because of the reactive support that has corrected the performance problems detected during some specific scale-up tests.

Finally, Clément also likes the many features that save him time every day, such as :

• Auto-scaling, which allowed him to manage traffic peaks without paying for oversized servers all year round. As a result, the move to Scalingo didn't cost anything extra, the bill was even a little lighter!
• The Scalingo dashboard that allowed him to gain visibility but also to download logs, database backups and even deploy from a smartphone.
• And also the convenience of self deployment and Review Apps with GitHub.

Compared to our dedicated servers, and despite Docker and all the infrastructure put in place at Scalingo, the loss of performance was imperceptible! Between the scalability, isolation, flexibility of the platform, and the very well done orchestration, bravo!

50% increase in revenue by reducing the workload of the technical team

Since the switch to Scalingo, HomeCinéSolutions' revenue has increased by 50% and yet the technical team has not changed. The workload on system administration has greatly decreased while integrating many new features, says Clément.

On top of that, the performance is there. The site is hosted on the osc-fr1 region based on the IaaS of 3DS Outscale and the average response time on the site is 120 milliseconds and 249 milliseconds at 95 percentile.

And yet the site still uses the same Ruby on Rails application as in 2006. It has been maintained since version 1.1 of the framework and has evolved to version 6.0.

With the switch to Scalingo, we have seen immediate gains on a daily basis. Before, we had to maintain our deployment scripts, do configuration, and supervise daily the current processes and all this without having control over many key services. Now we do everything in a few command lines and we can visualize our entire system. Thanks to Scalingo we save a lot of time, money and peace of mind.