Uptodown

Uptodown was established in 2002 as an independent Android marketplace that enables its users to download applications and games from all over the world. It offers an open and inclusive mobile ecosystem that both developers and users can use free of charge and without limitations, and is popular with mobile gaming enthusiasts, who come in search of games that haven’t yet been released in their country.

The Uptodown platform already supports more than 100 million unique users per month. The company is also hosting more than 1.3 million files and records more than 450 million downloads per month, which translates into 100 PB every year.

To host its services, Uptodown was using another provider, but had been left unsatisfied with their poor response times when requesting and deploying new products. The previous provider also offered limited availability and configuration, and this was hindering Uptodown’s ability to scale as a company.

In order to accommodate its huge volumes of traffic and downloads, Uptodown required a more scalable, high-performance hosting solution. As Uptodown’s platform is available in 15 different languages, this new solution also needed to be capable of serving data quickly and efficiently in multiple geographic locations worldwide. To reduce user waiting times when downloading apps, the solution also needed to deliver fast transfer speeds and the ability to handle peak loads in a predictable manner.

In addition to scaling its infrastructure, another major challenge facing the company was controlling associated costs. Previous services had long-term commitments and overly rigid contract conditions, which sometimes resulted in underutilised or obsolete resources after a short period of time. Uptodown required a provider that could offer much more accurate cost forecasting and greater flexibility in activating and deactivating services.

At Uptodown, we needed a flexible provider that would not slow down the platform's growth at any time.
Pepe Domínguez, Co-Founder and CTO at Uptodown

Uptodown currently uses an architecture composed of high-performance OVHcloud Dedicated Servers and Public Cloud services. The company also benefits from the vRack Private Network solution to connect servers internally.

Through the distribution of its datacentres around the globe, OVHcloud can provide physical servers close to target audiences. Uptodown is leveraging this to host its services in three different locations (Singapore, France, and Canada), where the company also has servers that act as load balancers, helping to efficiently distribute traffic.

OVHcloud's integrated production model also enables Uptodown to deploy dedicated servers with large storage capacity in just a few hours. Meanwhile, Public Cloud instances enable the company to scale and optimize the platform in a matter of minutes to cope with any spike in load.

With OVHcloud, we can have a new machine in a matter of minutes. As for support, even with the standard service, it takes less than an hour to replace a faulty disk. We have all the agility and scalability we need.
Pepe Domínguez, Co-Founder and CTO at Uptodown

All the applications available on its platform now reside on Dedicated Servers, such as the Advance, Storage and High Grade ranges, which provide large storage capacity with the highest disk performance. In addition, AMD processor-based servers deliver exceptional processing power — thanks to the latest generation AMD EPYC™ CPUs — and are optimized for specific, mission-critical workloads.

The vRack solution, a private interconnection exclusive to OVHcloud - with a guaranteed speed of up to 10 GB/s - allows all the machines in the infrastructure to communicate with each other to access both private and public resources. This included service, which is a paid service for most competing solutions, is essential for the platform to operate in a stable, efficient, and secure manner.

Another of Uptodown's obligations is to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Despite requiring as little information as possible (it is not necessary to register to use their platform) the company is backed by the security and transparency that OVHcloud applies in its storage and data protection policies. OVHcloud allows its customers to know at all times where their servers are hosted and guarantees the privacy of their data, thus improving traceability and reinforcing the protection of their users' sensitive data.

With support from OVHcloud, Uptodown has grown exponentially in recent years. Infrastructure implementation times have been greatly shortened, costs have been reduced to one-fifth compared to the previous provider, and the company enjoys an excellent price-performance ratio for all its services. In addition, it also managed to improve its profitability thanks to the free use of private networks with the vRack solution, as well as the absence of both egress and ingress traffic for all servers and cloud services contracted with OVHcloud.

The cost of maintaining the infrastructure was reduced considerably. The quality-price ratio offered by OVHcloud is unbeatable.
Pepe Domínguez, Co-Founder and CTO at Uptodown

Uptodown processes, analyses and categorises a file every 3 seconds. The power of the dedicated servers has been key to having a stable platform and the bandwidth necessary to accommodate such heavy data processing. In fact, during the first 3 months of the pandemic, the company recorded a sustained increase in traffic of 20% without ever experiencing a decline in service.

In addition, Uptodown has a high volume of traffic in countries like India, Brazil, Iraq, Turkey, India, and Mexico. This would not be possible if it were not for the geographical availability of OVHcloud with datacentres on 4 continents. Achieving an optimal level of data transfer and speed of service, OVHcloud's global presence has allowed Uptodown to become a leader in its sector in each of these markets.

Uptodown is a company in constant evolution. With the recent approval of the Digital Markets Act by the European Parliament, a new horizon of possibilities opens up for its growth and Uptodown will take advantage of all the potential offered by OVHcloud's versatile and secure infrastructures to continue improving its market share and business model.