Founded in 2001 in Gilbert, Arizona, Vivid Racing began as a small operation importing performance parts from Australia for turbocharged sports vehicles. What started as a two-person company, founded by Rob Rohn and Dan Mermelstein, has evolved into an automotive distribution powerhouse, now serving customers worldwide with roughly two million products online. From off-road UTVs to exotic Ferraris and Lamborghinis, Vivid Racing caters to automotive enthusiasts of all types.

Recently acquired by EEI (Enthusiast Enterprises Incorporated), an enthusiast group that owns multiple automotive companies, Vivid Racing is positioned for even greater growth as part of a larger enterprise with expanded buying power and industry expertise. However, this growth trajectory required a fundamental shift in their cloud infrastructure approach. Vivid Racing partnered with consulting firm AquaZeel to migrate from their legacy Rackspace environment, gaining the agility and scalability needed to support their expanding operations.

Challenge: Outgrowing legacy infrastructure

The company faced several critical challenges that threatened its expansion potential. As Vivid Racing scaled its operations, its existing Rackspace infrastructure became a bottleneck to growth.

Operational inefficiencies consumed valuable time and resources that could have been better spent on core business growth initiatives. “Even prior to migration, we had some major hurdles that we would need to overcome in terms of how well the operating system was or how out of date the code base is and whether that can be addressed by simply moving to another copy of the machine or upgrading the existing software,” notes Rob Rohn, Co-Founder of Vivid Racing.

With their previous provider, getting the support they required also proved to be challenging. “It took a lot of work to bypass the lower tier technical support to get the real help that we needed,” adds Rob.

Solution: Partnering with DigitalOcean and AquaZeel

While the team evaluated other options, including AWS, the complexity of those platforms proved daunting. Vivid Racing’s development team began testing DigitalOcean’s platform and eventually decided to migrate their entire cloud infrastructure. They decided to proceed with AquaZeel, a DigitalOcean migration partner, to ensure a smooth transition.

The migration strategy focused on a lift-and-shift approach to minimize complexity and reduce risk. “We literally copied what they had and moved it over,” explains Chris Peterson from AquaZeel. “The first batch went pretty quick and easy; it was more or less a copy-and-paste."

This approach allowed Vivid Racing to maintain operational continuity while gaining access to DigitalOcean’s modern cloud infrastructure capabilities for improved scalability.

Rob emphasizes the comprehensive nature of the support they received from AquaZeel: “I was really always more than impressed with Chris and his team diving in, planning, and getting stuff done.” The migration timeline was equally impressive. The first set of servers was moved within just four to six weeks.

Immediate impact and long-term benefits

The migration to DigitalOcean delivered immediate and measurable results for Vivid Racing. The company achieved approximately 35% cost savings while improving performance, scalability, and operational efficiency.

Beyond cost reduction, the partnership gave Vivid Racing the agility it needed to support its development team. The ability to provision resources on demand eliminated the friction that previously slowed their development cycles.

“We liked the malleability of DigitalOcean Droplets, being able to spin them up whenever we want, being able to allocate the resources that we need immediately rather than waiting for a Rackspace support ticket to get processed. Being able to more proactively serve the needs of our programmers was a big draw,” explains Julia White, Development Team Lead at Vivid Racing.

Scaling beyond migration

As Vivid Racing grows within its new enterprise structure, it plans to leverage additional DigitalOcean services beyond its current Droplet-based infrastructure. The company is exploring DigitalOcean’s AI capabilities as part of its platform modernization efforts, positioning itself to take advantage of emerging technologies in the automotive e-commerce space. Future initiatives also include implementing Spaces for CDN capabilities and upgrading to Managed Databases.

“We’re looking at using Spaces at some point for CDN, we’re probably going to see benefits from using Spaces. Getting their database upgraded and going with DBaaS will be a real positive change,” Chris notes.

Choosing the right partners for growth

For Vivid Racing, the key to success was choosing the right cloud platform and finding the right partners to support their journey. Rob reflects on this crucial aspect: “It really came down to finding a good partner to help us because we didn’t have a ton of resources on staff to really get this done. AquaZeel’s team really added a huge amount of support and gave us confidence to make this move as aggressively as we did.”

As Vivid Racing continues to expand its capabilities and serve automotive enthusiasts worldwide, its partnership with DigitalOcean provides the scalable, cost-effective infrastructure foundation needed to support its ambitious growth plans in the automotive marketplace.