Education · Mumbai, India · 2020
Ekeeda: pages three times faster, and a cloud move nobody noticed
Ekeeda was one of Hosting Seva's first customers. By 2020 its learning business had outgrown the systems underneath it. We modernised the platform without pausing the business inside it, and moved it to the cloud over one weekend. Learners never noticed.
- Client
- Ekeeda
- Market
- India
- Engagement
- Hosting, then modernisation and care plan
- Timeline
- 6 months
- In care since
- 2020
- Platforms
- Web, Android, iOS
3x
faster page loads, 6.2s to 1.9s
38%
lower infrastructure cost
Zero
downtime over the cutover weekend
The context
A working business on an ageing estate
Ekeeda helps engineering students and early career professionals learn through video courses, from university syllabuses to competitive exams. It already had learners, courses, staff and revenue. It also had a legacy .NET environment that had grown one urgent fix at a time, and pages that took more than six seconds to load on the phones most of its learners use.
Our relationship started earlier, in hosting. Ekeeda was among the first customers of Hosting Seva, the company our founders ran before the studio. So when the platform needed more than hosting, we already knew where every server lived and which ones kept the team up at night.
The challenge
A new interface would not fix a fragmented system
Learners, employees and internal teams each touched a different corner of the platform, and the corners did not talk. Course access lived in one place, staff records in another, enquiries in a third. Redesigning a screen without connecting what sat behind it would only have moved the friction somewhere else.
And nothing could stop. Exam seasons do not wait for migrations. Every decision had to respect existing data, existing learners and the parts of the business that could not pause while the new system was built.
Our approach
How we worked
Modernisation is a series of product decisions about what must stay familiar and what can change. We made them in the open, with numbers.
- 01
Listen & Learn
We mapped who used what: learners, faculty, sales and HR. The conversations surfaced the repeated tasks that wasted the most time, from finding a course to updating an enquiry.
- 02
Map & Measure
A full assessment of the .NET estate: what to move as it was, what to rebuild and what to retire. We measured page speed, traffic peaks and hosting spend before touching anything, so every result could be proven later.
- 03
Sketch & Shape
Designers reworked the learner portal and apps around course discovery and access, while the engineers drew the cloud architecture beside them: autoscaling for exam season peaks, a content delivery network for course pages and managed databases.
- 04
Build & Break
The new environment ran in parallel with the old one for weeks. We replayed real traffic against it and rehearsed the cutover three times, until it was dull.
- 05
Launch & Land
The move happened over one weekend. Suraj ran it from a paper checklist of 64 steps in his own handwriting. On Monday morning learners logged in to a faster site, and nobody called support.
What we built
What we built
A modern platform underneath a business that never closed for the work.
Cloud migration
The legacy .NET environment assessed, modernised and moved to AWS, with autoscaling, managed databases, automated backups and monitoring from the first day.
Learner portal
A redesigned portal built around the tasks learners repeat most: find a course, pick up where they left off, reach the next lecture. Search to course page now takes two clicks.
Learner apps
Android and iOS apps that share the portal's accounts, progress and course access, so a learner can start on a laptop and finish on the train home.
HRMS
Staff records, onboarding and leave moved out of spreadsheets into a digital system connected to the rest of the platform.
CRM
Enquiries, leads and enrolments tracked in one place, with course and payment data flowing in from the platform instead of being retyped.
Integrations
The connective layer that lets course, customer and employee information move between systems. It is the least visible part of the project and the one the team relies on most. More in our ERP and CRM integration work.
The outcome
What changed
Pages now load in 1.9 seconds, down from 6.2, three times faster on the same mid range phones. Infrastructure costs fell by 38%, because the new setup scales up for exam season and back down afterwards instead of paying for peak capacity all year. The cutover weekend recorded zero downtime.
Modernisation is often described as a technical migration. In practice it is a sequence of decisions about what must stay familiar, what can change and where the business needs better visibility. That is how we approach every cloud migration.
A unique online presence, reliable and fast web hosting, secure transactions using SSL and simple SEO services from Hosting Seva have all been key to Ekeeda's early success.
Care & Grow
After launch
In our care since 2020
The platform has been on our care plan since the cutover: monitoring, patching, backups and a named engineer on call through exam seasons, when traffic can climb several times over in a week. Uptime has stayed above 99.9% and pages have held under two seconds.
Most of what changed since is the team's day. Course updates no longer need a developer, sales works from one CRM and HR has retired its spreadsheets. A relationship that began with a Hosting Seva plan grew into the platform the business runs on.
Who worked on it
- Product designer
- UX designer
- Cloud architect
- Two .NET engineers
- Full stack engineer
- Mobile engineer
- QA engineer
Credits
D&C Studios carried out the modernisation, migration and platform work described on this page; the hosting years before it were with Hosting Seva, our sister company. Speed, cost and uptime figures are our own before and after measurements of the systems we run. Ekeeda’s enrolment and revenue figures are its own and are not shown here. The images show Ekeeda’s homepage as archived in December 2020, so the live site today may look different.
Stack and tools
- ASP.NET Core
- SQL Server
- AWS
- Redis
- React Native
- Content delivery network