Improving the car rental experience through transparancy
In 2005, EasyTerra started with the mission to make the online search for car rentals easier. The Leeuwarden-based company wants to achieve this by making the full range of car rentals visible and understandable. That way you can find your specific preference much better. Together with Worldstream, they went a step further. By also getting more control over the IT infrastructure. “Our origins are in IT. By using this knowledge and expertise we want to make the car rental market more transparent.”
Active in Car rental
Founded in 2005
Headquarters in Leeuwarden
More than 10 Employees
Making the right choice in the world of car rental is a complex task, according to CTO Erik Baan and owner Tjeerd Kramer. And always a personal one. EasyTerra wants to make a difference in the degree of transparency of what is offered. “That means that we display a large offering of car rental options. That means you can choose to book a very cheap car in Spain, but you'll get a warning. “We do our best to show the widest possible selection out of all the offerings while giving the best choices the most attention,” he said.
“We encourage people to choose a selection that we call the Worry-Free label. That label assures you that your rented car meets a number of requirements, but also that the rental company in question is in good standing, based on previous customer experiences.” If you choose a car that has that Worry-Free label, the chances of having unexpected costs are minimal. “We send our customers so well-informed on the road that they really just don't get surprised on the spot anymore.” With that same mindset, EasyTerra went looking for a new infrastructure.
From unnecessary costs to a flexible infrastructure
By examining its own IT infrastructure, EasyTerra came to the conclusion that there was a lot of room for improvement. As it turned out, it was not customizable. “We were with a provider that didn't quite meet our needs, so we decided to switch to managed hosting. There we quickly ran into the limitations of their managed aspect. What we understood as 'managed hosting' wasn't possible, and we still had to pay for management that we were actually in control of ourselves.”
In addition, it was quite costly for EasyTerra to continue using virtual private servers (VPSs) in conjunction with managed hosting. “We asked ourselves: what is the alternative? Cloud is also an option, of course, but that comes with all kinds of unexpected costs. Especially if you want as many resources as we're using at the moment, you're going to notice that in the price tag. In the cloud, it quickly becomes much more expensive.”
EasyTerra began by asking what infrastructure they required: “Are we going to use VPS solutions or dedicated servers?” With a dedicated server, server resources are exclusively assigned to one organization and hosted in a data center . With shared hosting, such as VPS solutions, multiple users share the same server resources. One requirement was that they would like to stay in the Netherlands, due to better network availability and geographic location.
Worldstream emerged as a suitable candidate, partly because of the pricing combined with the hardware specifications offered. One of the things EasyTerra noticed was its reliable appearance. When is an organization reliable? “Well, you just want easy contact, which was the case with you guys. Something we didn't have with the previous provider. We had to regularly brief the staff there about our managed hosting solution.”
Worldstream's SDN network ( Worldstream Elastic Network) allowed EasyTerra to set up a private network spread across two data centers. “The offline backups, they have to be hosted somewhere and we had been using S3 for storage for a long time, so it made sense to keep using that. Another aspect of our IT infrastructure is that we need a load balancer on the front end. For load balancing, we ended up choosing to solve that with Cloudflare.”
We could just continue with building additional features.
“Downtime never occurred either”
The delivery at Worldstream went very smoothly, so smoothly that Tjeerd and Erik had to think carefully about how it went. “We didn't even had to adjust the network. Downtime never occurred either. We got exactly what we were looking for. We could get right on building out additional service. In the beginning, we had also requested custom support. That experience was very pleasant and in terms of costs very surprising. We were used to the fact that custom requests always came with a high price tag.”
Clever way of showing prices
If you submit a search query on EasyTerra's website, you will not realize that all kinds of computational power are at the center of it all. The reality of any individual search is that thousands of prices are generated per search. There's a nice challenge in generating that as quickly as possible. “In recent years, we've done a lot of work on how the product offerings are collected. Those efforts are focused on making searches faster. Partly that's smarter programming and partly due to using more server resources. Every individual request actually is a unique search, because the combination of date, time, and destination makes it very personal.”
“Our origins are in IT. We use this knowledge and expertise to make the car rental market more transparent,” concludes Tjeerd Kramer. It is not surprising that EasyTerra ultimately chose to keep a large part of the infrastructure in its own hands. Together, they look forward to a future where personalization and transparency go hand in hand.