AutoTrack.nl case study

Download this AutoTrack.nl case study as a PDF (also available in Dutch)

Becoming the Netherlands’ leading online automotive trading market leader did not happen by chance. Since its founding in 2000, AutoTrack.nl has consistently focused on the quality of the experience it offers to both buyers and sellers. Potential buyers want to be able to search a wide range of used and new cars quickly and effectively to identify the ones they’re interested in. They want to be as informed as possible through extensive photos and details about the cars. Sellers want to be sure that the website will present their cars well, and is robust and stable.

At any time AutoTrack.nl carries advertisements for around 200,000 new and used cars; and receives more than 2,800,000 visitors per month. Although the previous incarnation of its website worked perfectly well, the company realised that the site’s software and hardware architecture would not be able to support the new features it wanted to add. To improve the user experience even further and prepare for the future, AutoTrack.nl opted to completely rebuild and relaunch its website.

Key enhancements of the new site include giving sellers the ability to provide even more information about their vehicles and post additional, extra-large photographs. Buyers also benefit from a new, more detailed search engine that makes it much quicker to find just the right car. As soon as a buyer enters their search criteria, the list of matching vehicles is displayed, providing the user with a much faster and more satisfactory result.

He continues, “The old architecture could not have been expected to cope with this. When we decided to relaunch the website, we knew we had to update the infrastructure as well as the software.”  

Optimum performance without fuss

AutoTrack.nl tackled this challenge by looking for an infrastructure architecture that would allow the site to perform optimally whatever demands were put on it. The company also wanted maintenance and management of the infrastructure to be taken care of. Engels: “I want to be free to focus on innovation for our users rather than on running the platform.”

A good, long-standing relationship with Colt led AutoTrack.nl to outsource the provision and management of its new web infrastructure platform to Colt, and Engels remains wholly satisfied with this decision. “With Colt you never get the feeling that you are being passed from pillar to post. We deal directly with assigned contacts who have the right expertise, so we don’t have to have that expertise in house. Platform changes are handled by Colt; and if there’s a risk of anything going wrong there are proactive alerts and Colt fixes it without troubling us — so we can focus on our business, developing and managing our site’s features and functionality to improve our customers’ experience.” 

Scalable solution with a flexible cost structure

“I already had a picture in my mind of how the new architecture should look, but ultimately the design was a joint consultative process, with Colt helping us to create our vision,” Engels continues.

The solution consists of a dedicated managed hosting environment, with Colt having full responsibility for hosting and managing all the infrastructure up to OS level. This includes AutoTrack.nl’s web servers, database servers, storage, load balancers and firewalls.

The website’s data, together with the photographs and information about every vehicle advertised, are stored on dedicated disks within a shared Managed Storage environment. The site uses a highly flexible tiered storage model: data associated with speed-critical processes using high-performance storage systems; and less speed- critical processes using lower- performance, lower-cost storage.

All the components of the infrastructure have redundant capacity, so tasks could be directly taken over if, for instance, an individual server should fail. The overall solution provides a flexible pay-as-you-go cost structure, with billing on the basis of actual usage so that Autotrack.nl doesn’t pay for capacity that might not be used for months.

In consultation with Colt, AutoTrack.nl has also taken the first steps towards virtualization. The managed web platform includes the development and test environment for the site, making it easy to move from development to production. Some servers in Autotrack.nl’s development and test environment have been virtualized, with positive results. If virtualization is applied in the area of production, this may achieve an additional cost reduction. 

Space for expansion

In practice, Engels has discovered that the infrastructure supporting the AutoTrack.nl website now has plenty of scope to cope with the highest peaks in traffic. Traditionally these peaks are on Mondays, as dealerships’ weekend promotions come to an end and buyers chase the best last-minute deals.

“With Colt’s managed IT services we have a sophisticated, multilayered architecture that’s easier to maintain than the previous environment,” Engels explains. “It gives us the flexibility to scale up AutoTrack.nl’s capacity quickly, whenever we need to, simply by picking up the phone to Colt.”

It’s also possible to reduce capacity and with it the costs incurred. “But there will be no question of that,” Engels says with a laugh, “given how fast our business is growing.” He concludes: “Our infrastructure is now something we can simply take for granted, which is exactly how it should be.”