“We have reaped considerable and immediate rewards by switching to AWS,” says Chan. “We have greatly increased the reliability of 9gag.com, which improves user confidence in our site.” Overall, Chan estimates a 20% improvement in server response times for the website and 10-20% improvement in overall network activity. “The reduction in latency enables our users to consume more content in the same period of time, improving their experience with 9gag.com,” says Chan. “In addition, we configured AWS security features to control network access and created security credentials for our employees. Now we have greater control over the security of our environment.”

The engineering team is taking advantage of the reliability of AWS to spend less time on operations and focus more on innovation. “Since deploying AWS, we have been able to reduce our typical two-week cycle by one and one-half days and get products to market faster,” reports Chan. “Introducing new products faster boosts our value to our customers, which is a competitive advantage for us.”

The company is also using AWS for new products and services, such as its new mobile application. “With AWS, we can be much more flexible in terms of meeting demand,” says Chan. “Mobile app users can also access our site and we recently added 1.5 million unique users to 9gag.com over a two-month period without any issues. We’re forecasting a ten to twentyfold growth for our site and we’re comfortable that by using AWS we can handle the growth.”

“The performance, capacity, and availability benefits make us extremely satisfied with the Amazon Cloud. We believe that Amazon Web Services is worth every single cent, and the return on investment is definitely good for us,” says Chan.