How AudienceKey Boosted Performance and Cut Cloud Costs with Ubicloud

3 min read

For half the cost, we got more than double the performance. And we dealt directly with the engineers who built the platform, not layers of sales teams. That made all the difference.

Sam Ingrassia, CTO AudienceKey

AudienceKey is a software-as-a-service platform designed for enterprise content marketers in e-commerce and lead generation. Their mission is to help brands unlock the full potential of organic search by mapping their keyword universe, running content experiments, and creating a repeatable growth engine. The team combines advanced keyword analytics, SERP monitoring, and content strategy to help brands identify new opportunities, identify new competitors and stay ahead of them. 

AudienceKey needed a database infrastructure that could keep up with the scale of their data, while controlling costs and delivering high performance. That’s where Ubicloud came in.

Breaking Free from Rising Cloud Costs

Like many growing SaaS businesses, AudienceKey found themselves grappling with rising cloud bills, especially as their data needs expanded. Hosting multi-terabyte PostgreSQL databases on their cloud provider meant paying a premium, which became harder to justify as their data footprint grew.

“AWS had taken advantage of how hard it was to move off their service. Costs were piling up, but it was painful to move multiple terabytes of data around.”

Sam Ingrassia, CTO AudienceKey

That’s when the team started searching for a provider that could help them break free; one that could deliver better performance and pricing. At the end, they found Ubicloud and cut their cloud database costs by 50% while boosting performance at the same time.

“The cost savings were significant for our business. It opened up a new budget for more things on the software development side.”

Sam Ingrassia, CTO AudienceKey

A-Grade Migration Experience

Migrating a multi-terabyte PostgreSQL database, especially one with complex partitioning, can be daunting. AudienceKey approached the move with caution, but the experience turned out to be refreshingly smooth.

“Migration was about as painless as I could possibly have expected. If I was to grade it, I’d give it an A. You can't really beat that.”

Sam Ingrassia, CTO AudienceKey

Thanks to careful preparation and Ubicloud team’s hands-on help, the migration avoided the typical snags; no unexpected downtime, no frustrating delays, and no drawn-out troubleshooting. AudienceKey was able to make the switch confidently, knowing they had direct support from the engineers who built the platform.

High-Performance Disk I/O for Handling Massive Data Sets

AudienceKey powers its platform with data — a lot of data. They track over 1.3 million keywords, have stored 4 billion+ search engine result page (SERP) snapshots, and run more than 100,000 content experiments every week. For their content experiments, they take fresh SERP snapshots, aggregate rankings, retroactively analyze competitors, and generate new insights. All of which require heavy disk I/O.

Ubicloud’s use of local NVMe storage eliminated the extra network hop typical in traditional cloud architectures. This gave AudienceKey extremely low latency for reads and writes, smoother data processing, and quicker delivery of insights to their customers.

“We got 2x more performance and in some cases it was 3x more. That was a pretty good deal for us.”

Sam Ingrassia, CTO AudienceKey

Support That Actually Helps

What truly set Ubicloud apart from competitors was the support experience. Instead of navigating layers of sales teams or generic support tiers, AudienceKey worked directly with the engineers who built the system.

“In our conversations with most of your competitors, the interactions were primarily through a sales team, so it was trickier to gain trust with our data.”

Sam Ingrassia, CTO AudienceKey

This hands-on support gave the team confidence and peace of mind, knowing help was immediate, meaningful, and delivered by experts who cared about their success.

The Results: Better Performance, Lower Costs, Greater Confidence

The move to Ubicloud delivered immediate, meaningful impact for AudienceKey:

  • 50%+ cost savings: Cloud database costs were cut in half, freeing up the budget for new software development and innovation.
  • 2–3x performance improvement: Thanks to local NVMe storage, data processing jobs ran faster, with smoother disk I/O and quicker delivery of insights to customers.
  • Painless migration: A seamless transition that avoided the headaches and unexpected downtimes that often come with moving multi-terabyte databases.
  • Trusted support: Direct access to Ubicloud’s engineers provided peace of mind and eliminated the friction of layered support or sales teams.

Ready to rethink your cloud?

Discover how Ubicloud can help. If you have any questions, you can reach out to us at [email protected].

SUMMARY

3x
Performance
50%
Cost reduction
AudienceKey cut cloud database costs by 50% and increased the performance of their PostgreSQL workloads by 2-3x after migrating to Ubicloud. They made the switch without the usual headaches of complex migrations, endless sales cycles, or high cloud costs. Just faster disk I/O, direct support from the engineers who built the system, and freedom to invest savings into new product development.
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