Lugmety is a luxury food delivery and reservation service in Saudi Arabia that provides users with an easy way to order from their favorite restaurants. When CTO Ashleigh Watson joined Lugmety in 2023, he set about to find efficiencies in the way their application was hosted. By moving to Premium CPU-Optimized Droplets, Lugmety increased performance by 85%, making their application noticeably faster and resulting in an improved user experience. In addition, hands-on support from DigitalOcean’s Premium Support service has helped them as they scale their app.

A performance boost from Premium CPU-Optimized Droplets

Lugmenty began as a vision to bring fine dining to people through an application that has now evolved into a comprehensive platform, serving the cities of Jeddah and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Lugmety prides itself on being more than just a delivery company, it is the ultimate destination for all things food and beverage for its customers, working to enhance users’ overall dining experience. From effortlessly securing a table reservation at their favorite restaurants to purchasing tickets to the hottest events in town, Lugemety brings these experiences to their users’ fingertips.

Lugmety was already using DigitalOcean for its hosting when Ashleigh joined the team as CTO, but the outsourced development team hadn’t spent much time on backend administration or server management. Ashleigh wanted to improve the performance of the application and its databases, so set about looking into how they could improve their infrastructure setup. He spoke with the DigitalOcean team, who suggested that Premium CPU-Optimized Droplets could help make the Lugmety app faster, and was surprised at how big of a difference the switch made.

“I was skeptical that a small change would make a big difference, but I was stunned at the dramatic performance increase when we switched to Premium CPU-Optimized Droplets. Our performance went up about 85%, and we’ve had customers and the team immediately noticing how much faster the application response time is since the change.” - Ashleigh Watson, CTO, Lugmety

Even being based in Saudi Arabia, the speed and usability of the Lugmety app improved dramatically when they started using DigitalOcean Premium CPU-Optimized Droplets for their databases. Lugmety also appreciates how simple DigitalOcean is to use, and that it doesn’t have unnecessary extra features the team has to learn how to use.

“DigitalOcean just works. It doesn’t give you tons of bells and whistles you don’t need, it just does its job well and has the infrastructure you need.” - Ashleigh Watson, CTO, Lugmety

While they’ve already experienced an excellent performance increase, Lugmety believes they will see even faster performance as they make more adjustments to their application and how it is hosted on DigitalOcean—they are planning a re-configuration of their application and will be moving more of their servers onto Premium CPU-Optimized Droplets after seeing the initial performance improvements. Lugmety is planning the next version of its application, which will leverage the latest NVMe SSD volumes that are included with Premium CPU-Optimized Droplets for optimal performance. They utilize DigitalOcean’s data centers in Frankfurt, Germany and Bangalore, India, but still find fast performance in Saudi Arabia.

“There’s always a delay in Saudi Arabia since data centers aren’t located here, but the delay is so low that you’d think it was here. All of the systems, from DigitalOcean’s networking to the Premium CPU-Optimized Droplets, have worked together to give us results.” - Ashleigh Watson, CTO, Lugmety

Premium Support has given Lugmety hands-on assistance

As a small business, Lugmety appreciates how easily they have been able to get support and advice from DigitalOcean’s solution engineering team. They signed up for Premium Support, which has given them access to a Slack channel that makes it easy for them to raise issues with the DigitalOcean team, and gives them peace of mind that questions will be answered quickly. They also get peace of mind from DigitalOcean’s security, and noted they’ve never had concerns when it comes to the security of their application.

Ashleigh has had experience with support teams at hyperscale cloud providers, which have been frustrating because of their lack of help and the amount of time it takes to get an answer.

“The Slack support channel is a great way of communicating with DigitalOcean. With some larger companies, the support is terrible—I’ve had nine calls with one representative and spent hours getting nowhere. With DigitalOcean, you understand the infrastructure, and when I ask something I’m given an answer right away.” - Ashleigh Watson, CTO, Lugmety

DigitalOcean has given Lugmety advice beyond basic support, including helping him decide what adjustments he can make to improve the performance even more. As Lugmety grows its application over the next years, they are excited to continue working closely with DigitalOcean to help them continue to modernize their infrastructure and get the best possible performance.

“Originally some of the ideas we had to grow the application we couldn’t implement because it would have been too much strain on our systems. But with the increased network bandwidth now we can grow more. DigitalOcean has been superb.” - Ashleigh Watson, CTO, Lugmety