Reviews.ai is a powerful consumer feedback aggregator. Their mission is simple but impactful: to help brands turn customer reviews into actionable insights. Co-founded by Julius Kurushko, he shares, “we analyze reviews for consumer brands or service-type businesses and then provide them with answers such as what their strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities are.” Unlike broader analytics platforms, Reviews.ai focuses solely on reviews, extracting maximum value from customer feedback to improve services and products.

After a recent rebrand from Review Monitor to Reviews.ai, the team began incorporating AI-driven features such as on-demand reporting, advanced topic classification, agents and “chatting with the data”—a reflection of the company’s future vision.

The Challenge

Prior to DigitalOcean, Reviews.ai ran on dedicated servers, which created friction as the company grew. Julius shared: “We outgrew our environment and it wasn’t a positive experience.” Their previous migration had been long and cumbersome, taking over six weeks and requiring an extra month of service from their old provider due to delays.

Faced with another potential migration, they wanted a change. “We gathered reviews from sites like G2 and others, analyzed the results, and found that DigitalOcean consistently stood out as a top choice.”

Seamless Migration to DigitalOcean with Aquazeel

Reviews.ai partnered with DigitalOcean and migration partner Aquazeel, led by CTO Chris Peterson. From the start, the difference was clear. “DigitalOcean offered a migration feature, and we met with Aquazeel and Chris from their team. Chris assured us that DigitalOcean could meet our needs and said he’d be personally involved in the migration. That personal touch didn’t just help - it was actually what sealed the deal for us,” Julius said.

Chris and his team took a hands-on approach. “We opened a Google Chat with them. Both sides were able to communicate directly, which streamlined everything,” Chris explained. Julius echoed this sentiment: “Instead of opening a ticket and waiting, we just had a streamlined process of communication. That made this transition and migration go so smoothly.”

What took over six weeks in their previous migration was accomplished in just a few weeks with DigitalOcean and Aquazeel—with a fully functional test environment set up within the first two weeks.

Technical Use Case & Products Used

Reviews.ai runs a multi-tiered architecture on DigitalOcean, optimized for flexibility and performance:

• Droplets power their core infrastructure, including compute instances for application servers and services that deliver their web interface and backend processing tools.

• Managed Databases store and serve customer feedback data, allowing their internal analytics and AI tools to operate at scale with high availability.

• Load Balancers ensure smooth performance and distribute traffic across multiple Droplets for speed and redundancy.

• DigitalOcean Backups give them peace of mind, enabling quick recovery points and disaster recovery protection.

• Floating IPs allow seamless failover between Droplets without service interruptions.

Looking ahead, the team is exploring DigitalOcean Gradient GPU Droplets to support their growing use of large language models and AI workloads, which power features like advanced topic classification and chat-based analytics. “We’re looking forward to trying some of the GPU Droplets… and plug-and-play third-party providers where we don’t have to reach out to support. We can do that much faster,” said Julius.

This setup gives them agility across their development pipeline, supporting staging, testing, and production environments with on-demand scalability.

Results: Cost Savings and Room to Scale

One of the most immediate benefits has been cost efficiency. “Close to 30% decrease in cost, which is pretty significant over time,” Julius shared. This frees up the budget needed for innovation and experimentation.

Chris added, “We transitioned them one for one and they got 30% savings, but…with additional optimizations, they could save another 10–20%.” The team now has the flexibility to either scale or downsize with ease—something their previous setup couldn’t support.

Looking Ahead: AI Expansion with Confidence

With their cloud foundation solidly in place, Reviews.ai is excited for what’s next. “We see DigitalOcean giving us the flexibility and capacity to easily scale up” said Julius. “Not having to figure out what we need to do to do that—we just go for it. That’s a big difference here.”

Julius also praised the long-term approach with partners like Aquazeel: “DigitalOcean’s ability to bring in amazing partners like Chris makes a big difference when you have somebody who’s involved in the business versus just migrating and forgetting.”

Chris affirmed that philosophy: “We’re here to support in the long haul…helping customers achieve their long-term goal.”