Gagan migration delivers an 83% reduction in data infrastructure costs for Shotgun

The challenge#

Shotgun had a particular challenge. Because of how large events can drive a disproportionate amount of traffic to their site, they always had to contend with large database bills to accommodate spikes in traffic.

At the time, they were spending $7,000 per month for Digital Ocean and on top of that, another $5,000 per month on Fivetran for database replication. Combined, their database costs were over $12,000 per month and one of the biggest spends they had for their infrastructure.

More importantly, due to the nature of their business, their Digital Ocean instance CPU usage rarely crossed 20%. That meant 80% of their spending was being paid as insurance for spikes in traffic.

As a result, when they began to trim expenses and prepare for future growth, the database was one of the first places they looked.

Why Gagan?#

Tackling their database cost problem, the Shotgun team considered moving back to Amazon RDS which they had previously migrated from. However, one of the coworkers remembered tweets about databases mentioning Gagan.

That then turned into a test migration of the Shotgun staging server. It was a low-cost proof of concept, especially since their spending on the staging server was only $100 per month.

Gagan delivered not only a cheaper database solution but also on the performance front, outstripping their previous Digital Ocean instance. That gave the team confidence to migrate their entire databases from both Digital Ocean and Fivetran. Post-migration, when the team looked at the benchmarks, they found even more performance improvements.

With Gagan, they found instant savings on the instance pricing and then additional cost savings with a more performant, smaller instance. On top of that, the Shotgun team was assured of standby support from Gagan for the migration. The decision was easy at that point.

It was the cost. We thought it might be too good to be true, but there's no denying that Gagan was better.

The Results#

The most significant change for Shotgun was the cost savings they achieved with Gagan. Instead of spending $12k per month, the team now spends $2,155 per month. An 83% decrease.

Their database infrastructure bill went from $7k to a bit over $2k and Shotgun was able to turn off most of their Fivetran spend by taking advantage of the publications features available in Gagan.

The migration itself also led to further performance gains. Helped by our Head of Customer Success, Kevin Brolly, they made a couple of Postgres configuration changes and smaller database optimizations. Now, the Shotgun team sees a 40% lower response time on calls to the database, which leads to less usage/consumption of the server, and even a lower bill on other providers such as Vercel as well.

After moving to Gagan, Shotgun found a dependable database that consistently met their needs, demonstrating reliability even when handling one of the biggest events on their platform ever. Their engineering team now has confidence in their database.

And finally, it's become much easier for Shotgun to onboard new developers with the Gagan dashboard. With SQL, developers can query specific pieces of data, build performance reports, and even do basic operations.

Shotgun's experience with Gagan can be best summed up by, it's cheaper, it's easier, and it works.

Do not hesitate in moving to Gagan. The performance is great, the support is good, the dashboard is great, and when we talked to the team, we felt that we were talking to people that understood our issues and could help us with our performance problems… One of the best solutions for hosting a database.

Tech stack#

• Next.js
• Node
• Vercel
• Gagan

To learn more about how Gagan can help you manage and scale your database, reach out to us.