Since launching in 2010, Snapdeal has quickly grown into one of India’s leading value eCommerce platforms. The organization has achieved this success by focusing on fashionable, stylish merchandise at value prices and embracing consumers in smaller, underserved markets. Snapdeal’s multi-lingual website is optimized for reliability, personalized to showcase relevant products for each customer, and backed by a sophisticated logistics network that covers more than 96% of the country’s postal codes. To continue to grow its business, Snapdeal needs to deliver unimpeded, uninterrupted access to its platform for customers across India – which is why Snapdeal chose Vercara’s UltraDNS.
Meeting the changing needs of success.
Snapdeal has grown explosively in recent years, tripling the number of customers on its platform between 2018 and 2020 alone. The company scaled rapidly to connect with all these new customers from locations across India, serving more personalized content from many more servers. Accommodating the growth placed new demands on the company’s infrastructure and IT team, particularly on the DNS service that is critical to every visit and transaction.
Upon reviewing its rapidly evolving requirements for a DNS partner, Snapdeal identified several must-have characteristics. The most important quality was attention to detail to ensure the service worked consistently. Snapdeal could no longer afford lapses in service or latency in its traffic.
Vikram Gaur, Associate VP for Cloud Infrastructure, Public Cloud, DevOps, and Enterprise Systems at Snapdeal, gave the example of updating DNS addresses. “We suffer a business impact if updates aren’t properly implemented and propagated,” he explained. “Our customers are not able to place orders. We lose revenue and brand value because customers lose confidence in your brand when you’re not able to serve them.”
Snapdeal was also looking for robust traffic management capabilities so the company could distribute its skyrocketing volume more effectively, as well as strong traffic reporting to help the IT team make more informed decisions. “We need to see where our traffic is coming from to understand patterns and accurately project traffic growth to mitigate any issues,” Gaur said.
Finally, Snapdeal wanted a provider with strong, responsive customer support. “We have a knowledgeable IT team. We understand there can be challenges,” Gaur noted. “We were looking for a proactive provider. With good communication, you and your partner can take coordinated action rather than just waiting for something to happen.”
Snapdeal chooses a provider to power its growth.
Gaur had worked with Vercara at a previous company and had experienced its reliable DNS service with excellent customer care. He was impressed by how the Vercara dashboard provided intuitive access to DNS traffic data and effective reporting capabilities, which were critical for managing access and monitoring traffic to Snapdeal’s heavily trafficked website. “The Vercara user portal has a very easy interface,” Gaur commented. “It’s very user friendly, and the reporting is excellent.”
He was also familiar with the product depth available through UltraDNS. “I knew Vercara had strong capabilities in traffic direction and load balancing, which would be valuable at Snapdeal,” Gaur explained. “They offer global load balancers to distribute traffic, and that can positively affect our uptime.”
To get the capabilities and ease of use the business needed, Gaur and Snapdeal made the switch to Vercara – and Vercara made the transition as smooth as possible.
“Planning and accomplishing the migration was easy,” Gaur said. “Traffic moved from one to five to ten and finally to one hundred percent. We could review the impact of the change on our business and our customer traffic and make sure the migration proceeded correctly. It was quite easy.”
Vercara delivers for Snapdeal.
The change has made a world for difference for Snapdeal and its IT teams. The company is now receiving more reliable and responsive DNS service.
“Our number one priority was achieving resiliency across the service, and that is done,” Gaur said. “We haven’t had any problems with our DNS updates being promptly and accurately propagated, for example.”
Snapdeal is also taking full advantage of the improved traffic visibility and reporting in the user portal. as well as the advanced capabilities in UltraDNS. “With Vercara, we can understand our traffic patterns and see how our traffic is growing,” Gaur explained. “We can compare DNS queries with our data on hits, and we can determine if we’re seeing bought or crawler traffic.”
“We now use UltraDNS as a load balancer to distribute traffic to our multiple sites and prevent slowdowns or disruptions,” Gaur added. “We can also use it to migrate traffic from on-premises servers to the cloud. And it provides a reliable option for failovers. We have only used that with Vercara because we knew it would work.”
For Gaur and Snapdeal, the bottom line is simple.
“Compared to off-the-shelf DNS services, we see value in the right updates being quickly and accurately propagated, and in product depth like traffic direction and load balancing,” Gaur said. “I would absolutely recommend UltraDNS to anyone, without any thought. DNS is critical for any website. There’s no doubt about that, and no room for poor service.”
Find out how UltraDNS can deliver reliable, worry-free access to your websites and digital infrastructure from anywhere in the world with lightning-fast query responses and industry-leading DNS resolution by visiting our product page.
