Insights > Customer Stories

Migrating from SaaS to Self-Hosted in AWS

A photography business wanted to migrate from its software as a service (SaaS) gallery to a self-hosted gallery to gain more control of its customer's experience. 

In a nutshell ...

SureShot Fotografie, a photography business, wanted to migrate from its software as a service (SaaS) gallery to a self-hosted gallery to gain more control of its customer's experience. 

The Problem

SureShot had been using gallery software, provided via SaaS, for some time but was frustrated by the product’s lack of features and value available to the company’s customer base. 

The Solution

Redapt experts deployed Piwigo, an open-source gallery solution on AWS, utilizing Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), and Amazon Route 53. After deploying various plugins for the features SureShot needed, Redapt assisted in the migration of the existing galleries and the cutover to the new service. Redapt also provided maintenance procedures that allow SureShot to keep its business running smoothly. 

The Outcome

SureShot achieved greater feature flexibility by self-hosting its gallery on the AWS platform and reducing monthly expenses by almost 10%. 

Moment of clarity

Using a SaaS solution is often the right choice, but when your business model outgrows the SaaS offering, a self-hosted solution can be extremely powerful if you know how to deploy it correctly.

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What the company needed

SureShot Fotografie needed features that were not available in the SaaS gallery software the company was utilizing. The company investigated other SaaS offerings that would meet the needs of its customers, but SureShot was not satisfied with any out-of-the-box solutions.

Our recommendation

Redapt suggested Piwigo, based on the outside-of-work experience of one of our engineers, knowing that the AWS-hosted solution was the right choice for SureShot and its customers. Our recommendations included:

  • Deploy the Piwigo application on EC2 instances behind an ELB. 
  • Utilization of a highly available RDS MySQL database. 
  • Take advantage of S3 and its object lifecycle management for long-term storage of images. 
  • Prescriptive best practices for security, availability, and resiliency. 

The end result

Following the engagement, SureShot Fotografie has found even more features from Piwigo's plugin ecosystem to further improve customer experience. 

  • Greater flexibility in the features provided to its customer base
  • Ease of management with Redapt-provided playbooks and best practices 
  • Cost savings contrary to expectations

Contact us to gain a little more clarity

We love a challenge. Tell us about your needs, goals, and the obstacles in your way. We’ll help you find solutions to get past them.

Get in touch directly:

results@redapt.com
(425) 882-0400