“Thanks to Google Cloud partner CloudMile, we were able migrate to Google Cloud with zero issue. From day 1, CloudMile has helped us with the plan about IDC infrastructure transfer to Google Cloud, talked to us in length about our needs as well as conducting training. “

Achieving enhanced user experience and conversion rate with Google Cloud migration by providing better website performance

Being a new parent is exciting and overwhelming at the same time. As parents prepare to welcome a new life, they often need to collect information by reading books, talking to family and friends, or browsing the Internet to find out what to expect, what to feed the baby, how to dress the baby, and what to buy.

Founded in 2002, BabyHome is a growing online community where parents can connect with each other through parenting stories and tips. Over the years, the BabyHome team has continuously added new features such as online shopping to enrich the website. In response to growing demand, BabyHome decided to change its hosting facility to Google Cloud.

“BabyHome is expanding rapidly outside of Taiwan with more and more users coming from China, the United States, Hong Kong, Japan, and Malaysia. Google Cloud has optimized our infrastructure for future growth. No matter where our customers are or which device they use, they can enjoy the best digital experience. “

“After migrating to Google Cloud, we can use resources as needed to develop and test new features for our customers. Product and service innovations are no longer limited by the servers’ storage capacity or bandwidth.”

One of BabyHome’s key criteria when it comes to choosing a cloud service provider is its location. BabyHome’s main business location is in Taiwan, so it is very important that Google Cloud can provide a local data center to minimize delay in data access and workload latency. Google Cloud’s global server load balancing redirects traffic outside Taiwan to the cloud region closest to the user to reduce latency.”

“Since migrating to Google Cloud, we have fundamentally improved site performance and overall user experience. The average webpage load time dropped to about 2.6 seconds, which is a 40% reduction compared with the previous hosting provider.”

PAINLESS MIGRATION TO GOOGLE CLOUD

BabyHome built the new infrastructure before dismantling the old one to make the migration to GCP painless. The migration team copied all real-time data from the source database (known as the “master” database) to a test database (known as the “slave” database) on Google Cloud.

The site was kept in maintenance mode to ensure that the content of the two databases was in sync. When the data in both databases was equalized, BabyHome upgraded the slave database as the master database and shut down the source database. As the last step, programmers transferred the data using a read-write connection to the new master database on Google Cloud to complete the back-end database migration.

In terms of Web service, all Web servers were first built on Google Cloud before the team redirected the URL from the old domain to Google Cloud. BabyHome activated the Google Cloud website service with almost zero downtime, and all members were able to use the site without encountering any issues.

“Thanks to Google Cloud partner CloudMile, we were able migrate to Google Cloud with zero issue. From day 1, CloudMile has helped us with the plan about IDC infrastructure transfer to Google Cloud, talked to us in length about our needs as well as conducting training. The migrating service was painless with minimal downtime. In the meantime, CloudMile continues to provide professional advice, the latest Google Cloud product knowledge and real-time support whenever we have any questions or problems. “

BabyHome is a new social blogging platform that integrates recording the baby’s growth process and sharing. One of the most popular new features is the personalized service, MyHome. Parents can record their children’s lives with photos, videos and text.

Over the past 17 years, BabyHome has accumulated a large amount of data, including text, photos, videos, member data, etc. The large amount of data has been transferred to the Google Cloud platform. In addition to integrating with MyHome, new features such as photo sharing and social media have been added.

MyHome has gained 8,000 new users since the migration. After the migration, GCP can handle the traffic required for uploading a large number of videos, photos and data with ease. We can provide better service to our users without worrying about the bandwidth.

OPTIMIZING THE SCALE OF IT RESOURCES ON GOOGLE CLOUD

Scalability and manageability are the main advantages of hosting on Google Cloud. BabyHome can buffer the sudden surge in traffic from sales and marketing activities to make sure the website functions well.

By migrating to Google Cloud, all computers are fully optimized for our online activities. Now we can use our resources efficiently and only pay for the capacity we need.

BabyHome adopts automatic expansion based on traffic to dynamically add and delete VM instances on the compute engine.

SIMPLIFYING IT MANAGEMENT WITH GOOGLE CLOUD CONSOLE

BabyHome used to send IT staff to the data center for daily maintenance tasks. Each trip between the office and data center took 2 hours.

“Hosting on Google Cloud means we don’t need to be physically present at the colocation facility to restart the server and troubleshoot. We use the cloud console to collectively check cloud applications on the compute engine. We can do it via the web user interface to manage our cloud resources anytime, anywhere.”

The Cloud Console is a user-friendly management interface available in multiple languages, including Traditional Chinese.

Strengthening Security with Google Cloud

Google Cloud uses SSH keys to control access to cloud resources. BabyHome grants users SSH access based on item permission. This security measure prevents data loss from potential hacking incidents and controls how data is shared.

For BabyHome, data backup for potential recovery is critical to keeping the business running. After all, protecting precious childhood memories captured in photos and videos is the most important task. BabyHome protects customer data through cloud storage backups from natural and man-made disasters such as earthquakes and unplanned downtime.

Optimizing Data Potential with BigQuery

Looking ahead, BabyHome hopes to use BigQuery, a serverless, highly scalable enterprise data warehouse to analyze website traffic, content interactions, and online sales data. BabyHome hopes to use customer insight to fine-tune marketing campaigns and increase sales.

Translated from: https://cloud.google.com/customers/baby-home/?hl=zh-tw