Shipit boosts performance and halves cloud spend with UpCloud
Founded in 2015, Shipit is a leading Finnish logistics technology company. With over a decade of experience in logistics innovation, Shipit provides over 40,000 customers with a revolutionary approach to shipping management. Their success is rooted in a modern, tech-driven approach, featuring customer-focused flexibility, an open API for seamless integration with ERP, WMS systems and strong native integrations with e-commerce platforms like WooCommerce and Shopify.
Prior to migrating to UpCloud, Shipit faced two primary challenges that constrained efficiency, these being unpredictable monthly expenses and the high complexity of managing their infrastructure.
The varying weekly resource utilization inherent to the logistics industry resulted in large and fluctuating monthly cloud bills. To address this, Shipit sought a solution that offered fixed, reliable costs without compromising performance or the ability to scale. Furthermore, while their previous cloud provider offered many services, the complexity of manual configuration, policy management and policy files created significant overhead for the development team.
“Our main challenges were large fluctuations in monthly expenses due to the significant variance in resource utilization on a week-by-week basis. UpCloud gives us fixed costs and quick upgrades via hot-resize when needed, which also shortens our maintenance windows for upgrades caused by resource starvation.”
Lari Pihlajapuro, Founder and CEO at Shipit
Shipit’s goals were clear, to achieve greater cost optimization, to ensure European data sovereignty and to simplify infrastructure management to accelerate developer velocity.
Shipit adopted UpCloud’s platform, utilizing a combination of Cloud Servers, Managed Databases, Object Storage and comprehensive Backups across both Finnish and Swedish data centre locations.
The company runs its primary API-driven product , shipit.fi, off this setup, managing core shipping, tracking and location services. The entire infrastructure is seamlessly managed using Laravel Forge, allowing Shipit’s developers to maintain a standardized and efficient environment.
A critical factor in the migration was UpCloud’s commitment to fixed pricing and European control. UpCloud’s Managed Databases provided the price guarantee Shipit required and the availability of data centers in Finland and Sweden ensures the company meets its European data sovereignty requirements.
Shipit’s tracking system generates substantial load, sending millions of daily requests and executing millions of write operations on the database 24/7. UpCloud’s infrastructure has handled this load effectively, preventing connection issues or lost data even under sustained/heavy usage.
The migration to UpCloud delivered substantial gains in performance, cost efficiency and operational simplicity. By moving workloads closer to their primary customer base in the Nordics and Baltics, Shipit achieved an immediate improvement in network latency, with the initial move from AWS to the HEL and STO regions resulting in an immediate 130ms drop in average response times. This performance momentum continued, resulting in a dramatic overall improvement.
“Moving from AWS to HEL and STO regions, we saw a drop of roughly 130ms in response times on average. This dropped another few dozen milliseconds after the recent EPYC CPU upgrade, which was a nice free upgrade.”
Lari Pihlajapuro, Founder and CEO at Shipit
Beyond the technical gains, the move provided significant financial predictability. Shipit achieved its critical cost optimization goals, reporting that their ongoing cloud expenses are now roughly half of what they would have been with their previous provider.
Finally, the setup has revolutionized developer workflows, as new servers can be deployed within minutes when combined with Laravel Forge. Paired with Cloudflare load balancing, this allows Shipit to perform maintenance and new region deployments with zero downtime. The platform’s simplicity also allows new developers to quickly grasp the infrastructure.
Shipit describes the collaboration with UpCloud as exceptional, highlighting that technical issues have been addressed and resolved quickly.
By prioritizing performance, cost-efficiency and simplicity, UpCloud has provided Shipit with a resilient, high-speed and geographically strategic platform to manage its logistics technology.
Looking ahead, Shipit plans to continue expanding its infrastructure and intends to explore advanced UpCloud features, including the Private Cloud offering, as well as modern infrastructure tools like Terraform and Kubernetes in the coming years.
We are excited to see Shipit go from strength to strength and look forward to continuing our close collaboration with the team there!
Looking to cut costs like Shipit? Contact our team to discover how UpCloud is optimising monthly cloud spend for our customers!
Read more about Shipit’s services.
