About the customer
This is a well-established UK eCommerce business with 100% of its revenue flowing through its website. They are a pure online retailer — there are no physical stores, no secondary revenue streams to fall back on. Availability is the single most important operational metric. The business experiences two main revenue peaks across the year: the run-up to Christmas and, to a lesser degree, Easter. During those windows, even short outages translate directly into significant lost revenue. Outside those windows, the tolerance for disruption is only slightly higher.
The challenge
The business needed to migrate its entire DNS infrastructure to a new platform. Through years of acquisitions and SEO strategy, they had accumulated 279 distinct domain names across multiple brands, subdomains and aliases. Around two dozen of those carried the bulk of the revenue. The window to do the work safely sat in the gap between Easter and Christmas — not a wide window. The cost of getting it wrong was immediate and measurable.
How we approached it
We took ownership of the project end to end: planning, budgeting, building all the infrastructure as code, creating a comprehensive testing environment, and designing the migration strategy for every domain. Each domain had a back-out plan. The testing infrastructure let us validate each migration fully before committing. The two dozen high-revenue domains got extra layers of scrutiny and staged testing before we touched the DNS records.
The migration wasn't without complications. A project of this scale rarely is. But we managed through them. Revenue was never affected. All 279 domains made it across before Christmas opened. The testing infrastructure we built remained in active use long after the project ended, giving the team a reliable way to validate future changes.
The testing infrastructure they built continues to be invaluable for our ongoing operations.
Chief Technology Officer
Beyond the migration
Alongside the DNS work, we ran a separate WAF migration. We had previously assessed three market-leading WAF solutions and recommended AWS WAF as the best balance of cost and capability for this customer. When AWS launched WAF V2 in beta, this company was among the first to adopt it. We ran the implementation in collaboration with AWS's own product team, working through edge cases and configuration details that weren't yet in the public documentation.
The new WAF gave them the ability to attach security controls to far more of their services than before, improving both their security posture and their resilience against the availability threats that matter most to a business like theirs.