World’s largest network of leading international travel websites scales dynamically with AWS infrastructure web services platform to support exponential growth
Leading online global travel network Swiftrank has turned to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform to enable the rapid scaling of Swiftrank’s growing network of more than 12,000 location-based travel websites.
Singapore-based Swiftrank’s extensive cloud-based network of interactive travel planning and booking sites features a “global to local” approach, offering travelers from across the world detailed insight into specific destinations while giving hoteliers and other travel merchants an opportunity to reach a broad, international pool of consumers. Unlike other online travel sites, Swiftrank sites provide partner hotels with direct links to their own hotel websites, driving highly profitable direct bookings.
In the weeks since going live with AWS, Swiftrank has seen noticeable improvements in site load speed worldwide, and the enhancements are improving the travel booking experience for consumers and merchants alike. “The flexibility of Amazon Web Services enables us to scale the infrastructure capacity both up and down in minutes, which has helped us accommodate our growing traffic and business. Perhaps most importantly, there is no risk in any single point of failure, and our hotel partners can be assured that they’ll never lose a sales opportunity,” says Bryan Harwood, Swiftrank’s senior vice president of strategy and innovation. “In addition, Amazon Web Services provides us with superior customer service and a secure transactional environment, which ensures a safe booking experience for our customers.”
With new websites launching every month and traffic growing rapidly, Swiftrank found traditional methods of hosting through multiple high-speed servers to be insufficient in keeping up with its exponential growth. To combat this issue, Swiftrank has tapped the cloud-based suite of products from Amazon Web Services, including the Amazon Simple Storage Service, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Amazon Relational Database Service, Elastic IP and Elastic Load Balancing. The AWS products work in conjunction with Swiftrank’s own DNS servers, which direct web requests to the load balancers in each region before distributing web traffic among the application servers.
In addition to increased site speed and scalability resulting from using AWS, Swiftrank sees important cost benefits. By incorporating cloud computing into its infrastructure, Swiftrank is realizing approximately 25% cost savings over the previous server setup. Furthermore, a full-time system administrator is no longer needed solely for software updates and security patching—another significant reduction in cost. It also frees up Swiftrank’s technology team to focus on innovation and improving the user experience of its market-specific travel-planning and booking sites.
For more information on Swiftrank and their online global travel network, please visit www.swiftrank.com.
About Swiftrank:
Swiftrank is the largest online global travel network, overseeing more than 12,000 location-based, optimized travel websites, including www.LasVegasHotels.com and www.SingaporeHotels.com.sg. Swiftrank generates profitable revenue for travel companies by offering hotels, resorts, restaurants, spas and car rental companies premium placements on one or more highly relevant, targeted Swiftrank sites. Swiftrank travel partners reach new customers, and they book this incremental business directly on their own sites through direct links from the Swiftrank network. Swiftrank, Pte Ltd., is headquartered in Singapore, with offices in the United States and the United Kingdom. To learn more about how Swiftrank can work for your travel company, visit www.Swiftrank.com.
