Scotch

Scotch uses Cloudflare to make their application faster and more secure.

Scotch is a web application that teaches computer programming with real-world examples. They strive to offer top shelf learning through informative tutorials explaining the code and the choices behind it all.

Scotch’s Challenge: Rapid Growth and Scale

As Scotch grew it faced a critical decision of how to best set up infrastructure for scale. “We’re more developer than backend server administrators” explained Chris Sevilleja, cofounder and CEO of Scotch, “so we were looking for a solution a solution that would allow us to focus on our product, while minimizing costs. Plus, because 85% of our traffic comes from Google search, it is important for us to render and serve content as fast as possible. There is always the next Google search result that a user can go to, so we needed something that would make our site loads and is delivered as fast as possible.”

Scotch’s Solution: A Multi-Tooled Network with a Solution for Every Challenge

“Cloudflare let us scale the business from when it was a WordPress site on a single server to what it is today,” Sevilleja continued. “We never had to worry about scaling our infrastructure and that let us focus on the things that made our business and product unique, the content.”

Scotch now uses Cloudflare’s CDN to improve site performance, load balancing to distribute traffic across servers, managed DNS service, Railgun and Rocketloader to improve dynamic content delivery, and Page Rules features to fine tune individual page behavior. Cloudflare’s global network spans over 330 cities, so when a student is trying to learn on Scotch, they get served content from the closest data center. In turn, the user experience on Scotch’s site is quick and responsive, and Scotch saves in bandwidth costs because Cloudflare is serving their content. “Cloudflare’s services greatly increase the speed of our site and in turn, increase our pageviews, time on site, and key metrics that we track for our business,” Sevilleja related. “The time we’ve saved has been well worth it considering the effort that would’ve gone into building all the features ourselves.”

Additionally, when Scotch began accepting payments, Cloudflare made payment processing compliance and implementing the necessary site security easy. “Having HTTPS and SSL certificates is important for any site selling things online for both the site and its users. Thanks to Cloudflare, that was all set up in minutes.”