Paper.li

 Building a unique brand presence online takes a lot of work and time but brings many benefits – from creating awareness to influencing on the topics that matter. To make it easier for small businesses and individuals to maintain an active online presence, Swiss company Finity SA has created the Paper.li Personal Marketing Platform, a powerful marketing SaaS 4-in-1 tool in a monthly subscription model that delivers personalized content, a fresh website, social publishing, and an easy newsletter creator.

Paper.li provides users with their own website in 5 minutes, updated every day with high-quality content on the topics they choose. While Paper.li takes care of the heavy lifting of building and maintaining a website, customers can personalize it, for example by writing comments, pinning posts or adding links and images. On top of that, Paper.li equips customers with tools to send their own newsletters and automate their social media publishing.

To offer its service reliably around the world, OVHcloud provides a scalable distributed infrastructure of state-of-the-art Bare Metal and Public Cloud servers that run the AI-driven algorithms for content curation and host the Paper.li platform for a seamless customer experience around the globe – at an affordable price.

Launched in 2020, Paper.li combines the worlds of content curation and digital marketing to keep customers’ digital channels active with minimal effort. Today, the Paper.li platform has more than 800,000 users worldwide and receives more than 2 million visitors per month. The service is offered in 11 different languages to accommodate its customers from all corners of the world, with its primary user base spread across the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, Switzerland, India, the Netherlands and more. This makes it an infrastructure with a global presence that also supports the company’s double-digit growth rate essential to its service.

To host its offerings, Finity was looking for a state-of-the-art cloud provider that offers the latest technology at an affordable price and that is preferably based in Europe to ensure a shared understanding of data security and data privacy. On a technical level, Finity has crucial need for high-throughput IOs and a good worldwide peering as the Paper.li platform is used all over the world.

Finity found a trusted partner in OVHcloud. The cloud provider’s vertically integrated business model allows control over the entire value chain. OVHcloud produces its own servers – about 400,000 each year – in its own manufacturing facilities. Each component is carefully selected and evaluated to solve the next generation of challenges.

Leveraging this technological advantage, Finity’s infrastructure has evolved into a highly scalable platform over the years, allowing the company to successfully manage the ever-increasing amount of content, users and visitors without the need to expand the physical infrastructure. Initially, Finity migrated from a well-known US-based cloud provider to OVHcloud, using Bare Metal solutions to set up its own software infrastructure. As a first result, Finity was able to significantly reduce operating costs compared to the previously used service.

Later, Finity started using OVHcloud Load Balancers to meet the demands of its growing business. The Load Balancers distribute the load between services in OVHcloud’s data centers. With this service, customers can more flexibly scale their infrastructure to handle high volumes of traffic, gain a high fault tolerance, and provide optimal response times. This technology offers Finity a high-availability balancing capability over the company’s multiple front-end servers. Finity also offloads SSL/HTTPS to this infrastructure, freeing resources to process users’ requests. Lately, Finity has started to exchange some of the Bare Metal servers with Public Cloud instances for increased flexibility and scalability.

“We have an important need for high-throughput IOs and a good worldwide peering as our service is used all over the world. With innovation at the heart of OVHcloud, we are always sure to benefit from the latest technology on the market without the challenges of trying and testing components on our own.”
Reynald Borer, CTO, Finity SA

For worldwide latency-free availability of the Paper.li platform, OVHcloud set up a distributed infrastructure with more than 90 physical servers all over the world. In total, OVHcloud operates 32 data centers across 4 continents which are connected via OVHcloud’s own dedicated 20Tbps fiber-optic network to ensure optimal stability, redundancy and availability for customers.

Finity has built the core of its infrastructure on top of a Kafka messaging bus running on 5 servers. While the platform is divided into multiple pipelines that fetch, process and export content, and that are conducted by a couple of schedulers, its main storage cluster comprising 40 servers runs Cassandra and stores 4 TB of data. Combined with the distributed character of the infrastructure, this allows the platform’s AI (artificial intelligence) algorithm to process 405 million social media posts and crawl 46 million URLs per day. Based on this data, Paper.li uses machine learning to train a classification model that can be used to assign articles to a predefined list of categories. With the help of Natural Language Processing (NLP) solutions, the keywords of each article can be extracted at high speed and used for the article search. The AI-powered classification model and NLP capabilities are critical to the platform’s functions to provide customers with appropriate content for their digital channels. As a result, Paper.li publishes 248 million articles, photos and videos every day, sends 200,000 newsletters and posts 40,000 tweets.

Leveraging OVHcloud’s scalable global infrastructure, Finity SA’s Paper.li platform offers customers an easy way to build an active digital presence. With its AI-powered content curation and automation, individuals and small businesses can do the work of a marketing team on their own and even from their mobile device, within minutes. Users benefit from worldwide availability through OVHcloud’s data centers hosting the distributed infrastructure that Paper.li runs on while Finity can rely on always using the latest technology and well-tested components thanks to OVHcloud’s continuous research and development.

Using Bare Metal servers and Public Cloud instances, Finity has the freedom to build and run their own infrastructure and focus on their core business, while OVHcloud’s teams take care of the administration, maintenance, and security of all hardware across its data centers. OVHcloud’s predictable pricing at an affordable level allows Finity to provide a highly reliable, available and competitively priced platform to Paper.li users worldwide.

“OVHcloud offers a high-quality infrastructure at a competitive price. And a worldwide presence. That was a key factor for us in choosing an infrastructure provider.”
Dan Di Federico, CEO, Finity SA