How Vip District provides an all-in-one employee engagement platform to millions of users with DigitalOcean

Vip District is a B2B company based in Spain that provides an all-in-one employee engagement platform to mid-size and enterprise businesses across industries—from banks and insurance to telecom and consulting. They use DigitalOcean’s suite of cloud infrastructure products, including Droplets, Spaces Object Storage, and Volumes Block Storage, to keep their platform stable and performant for millions of users across Europe.

Recognizing a gap in the market for an employee engagement solution in Spain

In 2010, a group of entrepreneurs observed the success of employee engagement platforms in The United States. They saw the potential for a similar solution in Spain and co-founded Vip District with the goal of strengthening the bond between companies and their employees, collaborators, and clients. Today, their platform sells to companies with over 300 team members who want to motivate their employees with perks, incentives, and recognition.

Their employee engagement platform includes solutions like Vip Savings, hundreds of discounts for employees for products at major companies; Vip Incentives, points, incentives, and gifts for employees and collaborators; Vip Awards, peer-to-peer employee recognition through campaigns and points, and Vip Connect; a corporate social network to share content, create activities and interaction among employees

The company has grown to over 120 employees, while the platform currently serves more than six million users with customers in Italy, Portugal, France, Germany, and The Netherlands.

Addressing the challenges of cloud instability and scalability

Victoria Lidón, Vip District’s Director of DevOps, leads the building, optimization, and security of the company’s systems, ensuring the high availability and scalability of their technology. When choosing a cloud provider, the tech team landed on Linode. While it served their platform needs initially, this was short-lived.

“We began to have some issues with the networking and some breaks in service throughout the day with Linode. It was not as steady as it was before.” — Victoria Lidón, Director of DevOps at Vip District

They soon sought out a new cloud provider. They explored platforms like AWS and Google Cloud, but found the slew of options unnecessary. Additionally, they were apprehensive that available configurations could lead to vendor lock-in, putting them at risk of dependency.

“From the beginning, my philosophy is that we don’t want to depend on anything specific from a vendor. I just want blocks of hardware and blocks and storage. We wanted something to build on at a fair price.” — Victoria Lidón, Director of DevOps at Vip District

Adopting the simple DigitalOcean solution

Victoria’s team sought out a cloud solution that could provide them with the stability and security they required as a scaling company but without the complexity of an enterprise cloud provider. They chose DigitalOcean.

“We went to the market to explore the competition. We found DigitalOcean and liked the speed, stability, and simplicity.” — Victoria Lidón, Director of DevOps at Vip District

As their product scaled and gained more users, speed and performance were at the top of their criteria for a cloud provider. They closely assessed the hardware offerings of providers and found that DigitalOcean’s technology came out on top.

“When I was running performance tests when starting DigitalOcean, you were one of few providers using SSDs as the default for images, which provided extra speed. This put you ahead of the competition because half of them were still using HDDs as the standard.” — Victoria Lidón, Director of DevOps at Vip District

Fast-forward to today, and the team has been able to scale with ease using DigitalOcean Droplets, Spaces Object Storage, and Volumes Block storage.

Scaling with confidence using DigitalOcean

As Vip District has grown its company and user base, they now serve big companies in industries like finance that require its platform to be highly performant. DigitalOcean has given them the confidence to scale.

“With DigitalOcean we are more stable than before. We have SLA contracts with our own customers and being down means providing refunds, and more importantly, reputation damage and doubt about our product. Since we moved to DigitalOcean, I sleep better knowing that everything is under control.” — Victoria Lidón, Director of DevOps at Vip District

Vip District is constantly improving its products, furthering its mission to enhance the well-being and performance of employees. Additionally, they have their eyes set on scaling.

“We are expanding internationally. This will have an impact on our systems. Right now we’re based in Europe, and with our growth speed maybe we cross the continent in the future. As we extend our clients worldwide, the systems will need to adapt, with both technology and regulations in mind.” — Victoria Lidón, Director of DevOps at Vip District

Looking towards the future, the tech team at Vip District is confident in their ability to grow and provide the best platform possible for all the brands on their platform, and the new ones they plan to add.

“Having a stable cloud platform gives us strength to grow, knowing everything will be okay. We can grow and grow and the platform remains stable.” — Victoria Lidón, Director of DevOps at Vip District