Hostinger
A fast-growing web hosting company Hostinger expanding its offerings to introduce a CDN for its customers turned to Catchpoint’s Internet Performance Monitoring platform to measure and optimize the end-user experience of its customers.
Key challenge
Hostinger needed to gain visibility into the performance of its CDN and measure its ability to improve customer experience.
Key results
Hostinger can quickly and proactively identify availability and performance issues impacting its global users thanks to regional visibility into every aspect of the Internet Stack.
We were considering ThousandEyes and Catchpoint. We’re very happy with the choice. The main reason we selected Catchpoint was its industry-leading number of backbone locations worldwide. Our clients can choose from eleven datacenters around the world, and we plan to extend the choice even further. With over 3 million clients in more than 150 countries, we needed a single provider that had visitor-like eyes for us to see how visitors experience our websites from different parts of the world. The investment with Catchpoint has already helped me and my team identify and resolve issues during incidents and provide actionable insights for our executives too. On an individual level, I’ve been excited about the number of different test types Catchpoint offers. I’m currently exploring how we can expand beyond just monitoring our CDN to monitor DNS, SSL, and other elements of the Internet Stack to ensure an even better experience of all services to our customers.
Problem
Recently, Hostinger developed its own CDN in-house. Its CDN is not sold as a standalone offering for third-party customers but is used rather to support Hostinger’s own hosting customers. Hostinger mainly provides shared hosting and in recent years, has seen the number of DDoS attacks against its customers growing significantly. The need for a CDN to provide an added layer of security and improve speed for its customers became evident. Instead of using a third-party CDN integration, Hostinger’s software engineering team decided they had enough in-house expertise to build the CDN themselves. Now, higher-tier shared and cloud hosting clients enjoy seamless CDN integration, making their websites up to 40% faster, and engineers can manage and develop the CDN according to the actual client needs.
As they launched the CDN, they realized they needed an Internet Performance Monitoring platform that could give them valuable data and insights into how the CDN was performing, where the biggest opportunities to improve exist, and metrics on reliability and resilience for all its customers and their users.
Solution
Since Customer Obsession is Hostinger’s no.1 principle, the IT team realized it needed an independent monitoring solution to objectively and precisely assess how their global users feel the CDN service performance. For its higher-tier shared hosting clients in particular, the need for Internet resilience and reliable uptime is critical. Given the company’s global customer base, Software Engineer Aurimas Lapiene started his search for a CDN Monitoring solution with a worldwide observability network to gain “visitor-like eyes” to monitor (and continuously improve) performance. As Aurimas says, real-life customer experience provides a much more accurate picture than artificial tests.
The search quickly narrowed down to just two: Catchpoint and ThousandEyes. In choosing between them, Aurimas looked carefully at the number of monitoring locations each provider had and the quality of its backbone presence. He was taken by how extensive Catchpoint’s observability network was, along with the large number of different top-tier Internet providers within those worldwide locations. Once he realized that every large CDN provider uses Catchpoint to measure its own performance and the calibre of worldwide brands relying on Catchpoint, he realized the quality of Catchpoint’s CDN Monitoring solution. After trying it out himself and finding out about the extensive nature of test types, detailed storage capabilities and versatile portal dashboard, he was sold.
Results
Within two weeks of starting to use the software, Hostinger discovered an issue impacting user experience that had previously gone undetected for months. The Catchpoint platform alerted Hostinger to the fact that certain websites in certain regions of France were not accessible to its users there at all when connecting via a certain ISP. Thanks to the detailed visibility into the Internet Stack Catchpoint is providing, Aurimas was quickly able to determine exactly which customers were impacted and as importantly, pinpoint the root cause. It was traced to a network routing BGP issue on a local Internet Service Provider, and the team was then able to work directly with the ISP to resolve it and restore service. Faster MTTR led quickly to improved customer experience and an easier day at work for Aurimas!
Catchpoint has also significantly improved Hostinger’s ability to detect performance bottleneck issues worldwide. In one instance, Catchpoint pinpointed why a particular datacenter was experiencing intermittent downtime, tracing the problem to a network configuration issue. This level of granular insight has given the IT team the visibility and understanding it needed to know where to apply its focus. Thanks to Catchpoint’s IPM platform, the team is now prioritizing improving DNS response times globally. This latest initiative will allow Hostinger to further its overall mission of improving global user experience by improving website performance.
Outcomes
- Able to reach 99.999% of monitored uptime for its higher-tier shared hosting clients
- Pinpointed an issue with an ISP in France that was not identified before - within minutes of deploying the IPM platform – improving MTTR dramatically
- Identified strategic focus for IT team to improve global DNS response times
