With DigitalOcean, OBO has full control over its infrastructure

Summary

• As the B2B marketing firm OBO grew, it faced challenges scaling with the cloud
• Maintaining integrity during migration was crucial to OBO, and they experienced zero lag time migrating to DigitalOcean
• Following their migration, OBO has considerably more control over managing their infrastructure through automation of DigitalOcean’s API, enabling them to focus on delivering sophisticated marketing campaigns for their business customers

Challenge

A B2B marketing firm, OBO helps businesses develop sophisticated multi-touch campaigns to attract and inspire customers. Founded in 2016, OBO began leveraging the cloud to do its technology-driven marketing work.

With more customers onboarding at a rapid pace, OBO created new data nodes that they needed to pay for on a per-node basis. As the company scaled and spun up more and more servers, this created an infrastructure setup that was excessively complicated and costly.

Due to increasing expenditures, OBO began to seek out other providers but was faced with equally expensive and unintuitive options. Then they found DigitalOcean.

The DigitalOcean solution

OBO established their place in the cloud with DigitalOcean. Though they made the decision to switch quickly, they did not make the decision lightly: maintaining integrity during their migration was crucial. Essentially starting fresh with DigitalOcean, OBO spun up all their initial servers their first day, starting with 10 total servers then and scaling up to 40 servers today. During their migration, OBO experienced zero lag time.

With MySQL databases and email servers for more than 50 of their clients, OBO sets up custom Linux setups that run on Droplets. With flexible resources, OBO is able to choose the best Droplet for each individual customer’s needs.

More recently, OBO has started migrating all client email image hosting to DigitalOcean’s object storage solution, Spaces. Tackling this work one client at a time, they have experienced a smooth process storing client assets and managing permissions.

Simplicity, scalability, and peace of mind

The ease of use and reliability of DigitalOcean has enabled OBO to focus more of their attention on the complex and data-driven technical marketing work that they do every day. With infrastructure on DigitalOcean, OBO has considerable control to manage everything from the backend through Python scripts and automation. When OBO needs to build a new server, it only takes them about two minutes to take one down and rebuild it to accommodate new specifications.

“Our old solution was a hassle when trying to grant read and write permissions. We just wanted a simple solution that solved our file hosting problems. Spaces was a phenomenal solution that was easy enough for all our employees.”

Consistent with the simplicity of DigitalOcean products, OBO has found Community tutorials, product docs, and the developer-centric blog to be relevant and helpful as they continue to expand their business and scale their infrastructure. Being able to benefit from an existing ecosystem of community-minded resources has enabled OBO to leverage the cloud more effectively.

As OBO continues to grow and bring in more DigitalOcean products into its infrastructure, they provide reliable and scalable solutions for their own business customers. With DigitalOcean, OBO spends less time thinking about servers and more time focusing on the technology of marketing.