About PicClick
For eBay power shoppers, finding the right item is all about speed and visuals. PicClick transforms the standard search into a rapid, image-rich browsing experience. This is especially crucial for niches like collectibles and vintage goods, where seeing more listings faster wins.
Behind this tool is Ryan Sit, a seasoned entrepreneur with over twenty years in tech. As Founder and CEO, he has grown PicClick for 17 years into a platform serving millions. At its peak, it facilitated over a billion dollars in annual sales.
Running a lean, efficient operation has always been a priority. For a visual search engine handling massive traffic, reliable and scalable hosting is not just a detail. It is the entire foundation. Any downtime or slowdown directly impacts the user experience and the business.
This is the success story of how PicClick’s search for a better hosting provider led to a remarkable ten-year partnership with Cloudways. It’s a case study in scalability, support, and focusing on what you do best.
Cloudways: Can you give us a brief overview of your business and what role cloud hosting plays in supporting your operations? Also, how long have you been using Cloudways?
Ryan Sit: PicClick.com has been around since 2008. We strive to be a lean business with only 10 employees. When we launched, we ran off of our own 1U server in a colocation. When we moved to the cloud, it was a game-changer in efficiency.
We have been using Cloudways since July 2015, over 10 years now!
– PicClick’s visual search interface allows users to see hundreds of eBay products at once, requiring a fast and reliable hosting infrastructure.
Cloudways: Before switching to Cloudways, what were the main challenges you faced with your previous hosting solution, particularly regarding speed, scalability, and reliability?
Ryan Sit: We had two setups before Cloudways. First, we had our own colocation rack in a local place in San Diego. It was nice and common at the time, but we had to manage everything ourselves and pay up front for all the hardware.
When something major happened to the servers, we literally needed to drive down to the colo and fix the servers, sometimes in the middle of the night.
Then we moved to MediaTemple, which worked for a time, but they were limited in customizations, scalability, and real customer service.
Cloudways: What specific issues led you to search for a new hosting provider? Were there any critical performance bottlenecks or concerns that Cloudways helped address?
Ryan Sit: We started looking for a new provider after a major failure and downtime with MediaTemple.
Also, at a large scale, their servers started costing a lot at the time. AWS was starting to become the main standard in servers.
Cloudways: Can you walk us through your decision-making process when choosing Cloudways over other hosting providers? What stood out most to you about Cloudways?
Ryan Sit: We wanted to move to AWS. I had used them in a previous business, and their momentum was growing in usage and features. The problem with AWS is that it takes a good amount of IT staff time to manage it all yourself.
With the other business that was possible, but with PicClick, we made decisions to be very lean with staff, so we could move more quickly on development.
Cloudways was remarkable when we first found it. We got most of the benefits of AWS, but without the need to manage the servers ourselves. Specifically, we needed some unique server customizations, wanted to use AWS, but didn’t want to hire IT staff and manage the upgrading and security of the servers.
Cloudways gave us that at a very efficient price point and super attentive IT. I have always been able to get real-time chat support on our servers 24/7 with Cloudways.
– Through Cloudways, PicClick leverages the power and global infrastructure of AWS data centers, without the complexity of direct management.
Cloudways: What was the onboarding and migration process like when you first moved to Cloudways? Were there any unexpected challenges or smooth wins during the transition?
Ryan Sit: We use a pretty standard LAMP stack, which is directly supported right away on Cloudways. It was straightforward to move over.
But the biggest thing was having support always available immediately to answer any questions and fix any problems we had. With Cloudways, we have access to the best servers on AWS, at a good price, with full direct support.
Our entire IT is outsourced to Cloudways. Cloudways is constantly working on improvements and updates; we don’t need to stress about that. If any server problems come up, we are able to connect with a real human right away to work on the issue.
Cloudways: After moving to Cloudways, what measurable results or improvements did you see in terms of site performance, speed, and uptime?
Ryan Sit: After moving to Cloudways, the biggest improvement we gained was scalability. Before, we would need to manually scale or move servers. On Cloudways, we are able to quickly scale in a matter of minutes at any time.
Through our 10 years with Cloudways, we have switched architectures a number of times and needed to scale traffic multiple times in large steps. For example, during COVID, ecommerce traffic took off for everyone. Cloudways helped us through all the scaling with no problems, all remote.
Over time, we were able to scale from around 1 million unique visits per month to over 40 million, without increasing our IT headcount or making major cost changes. Cloudways handled all of it smoothly, with only normal scaling and bandwidth adjustments.
While the direct speed or cost improvements were modest (roughly 10% faster and up to 20% more cost-efficient), the key success was sustainable scalability. As traffic grew, our Cloudways costs became even more efficient relative to revenue, proving the platform’s value at scale.
Also, at one point, we scaled to many different countries with different servers. With Cloudways, we were able to clone setups and launch new servers for new countries in a matter of hours of planning.
– With Cloudways, PicClick achieved seamless scalability to handle massive traffic surges and easily launched servers in new countries within hours.
Cloudways: In the search industry, where speed and reliability are crucial, how has Cloudways impacted your user experience and the performance of your site, particularly in handling traffic spikes or eBay searches?
Ryan Sit: Beyond the server scaling above, the great thing about Cloudways is that they are always working to improve themselves.
Before I even need it, they provide newer versions of PHP to upgrade to, already support HTTP/2 before we needed it, and are always working on upgrading servers to the highest performance.
It is like a team always working and making the right decisions, without us needing to manage the team.
Cloudways: What Cloudways features or add-ons have become essential to your daily operations? Are there any specific tools or capabilities that have helped you optimize your site further?
Ryan Sit: The Cloudways dashboard is the main essential part of Cloudways that we use. They have been constantly improving the features of the web dashboard since we started using Cloudways. They just finished rolling out a new version recently.
Through the easy dashboard, we have tons of access to features we use regularly. We are able to directly edit the firewall, monitor performance, manage SSL Certificates, manage servers, handle backups, and set up Cron jobs.
So there is this nice balance where we have easy and powerful control to do most of the things we want to do ourselves, but we also have access to Cloudways’ support to jump in and help us when we need a real person to work with.
– The Cloudways platform provides simple, one-click SSL management, making security maintenance effortless for the PicClick team.
Cloudways: Can you compare your experience with Cloudways to previous hosting providers you’ve tried? What aspects of Cloudways stand out in terms of performance, customer support, or flexibility?
Ryan Sit: There are multiple ways Cloudways is much better than the other hosting setups we have used or considered, but by far the aspect that stands out is the customer support.
PicClick has been with Cloudways almost since they started, so we have both grown up together, kind of. Through all these years, they have had great baseline support, but even more, they have gone above and beyond for us many times, in personal ways.
Their customer support, or rather “customer care”, is what we have valued most.
Cloudways: What advice would you give to other companies in the search industry that are considering Cloudways for their hosting needs? What would you tell them to expect in terms of results and experience?
Ryan Sit: You will get more than what you pay for with Cloudways. You do not want to manage your own servers and hire your own staff for that.
You want to focus on your main thing, which is your website and development. Cloudways is a great partnership to have, so you can move faster and create the most value efficiently.
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