Pilulka.cz e-shop’s revenue exceeds 70 million GBP on vshosting~ servers

The Pilulka Lékárny group has been operating on the Czech, Slovak, and Romanian markets since 2013. They manage 125 Pilulka pharmacies along with online pharmacies.

In 2017, they received the APEK E-commerce Award 2017 for the most innovative and original online store.

Ever since they started the business, Pilulka have been looking for a partner that would help them set up the infrastructure in such a way that would be easily scalable in the future.

Aside from reliability, the ability to proactively bring propositions for improvement to the table was also an important selection criterion for them. Simply a partner that can manage the quick growth of a small business into a huge one.

vshosting~ managed to come up with a proposal of fully scalable infrastructure, customised to our needs. In addition to that, we received many suggestions regarding the choice of appropriate tools which made our rapid growth much easier (and cheaper).

On top of this, vshosting~ has experience managing large internet projects, so we knew right from the start that we’ll be in good hands.

Due to the significant size of the Pilulka project, we are currently using a Managed Cluster that deals with requests towards their company websites. The cluster is complemented by a group of Managed and Dedicated servers, where we operate various supporting services (central logging from servers, analytical services and tools, testing and development environments).

The cluster comprises two load balancers that distribute requests among the various servers in the cluster and is at the same time realised as an SSL request accelerator. The servers operate in active-backup mode – in the event of a malfunction of the active node, all traffic is redirected to a backup server within seconds. Web requests are distributed from load balancers to a group of application servers that are containerised and each application runs entirely on its own, completely separate from the rest.

Containerisation allows for a lot of flexibility when working with applications – e.g. upgrading to a new version of the application by launching a new version of the app in a new container and after testing seamlessly deploying it into production with zero downtime. All of the website requests are processed by these application servers, be it dynamically generated or static content. Static content is stored on central disc storage which works in sync with all of the application servers – this type of content then doesn’t need to be stored on each server separately which saves financial resources but more importantly simplifies the application design because you don’t have to worry about data synchronisation.

The cluster also consists of a trio of database servers where both SQL and NoSQL databases run. As an SQL database, the MariaDB database in the Galera mode is used, which is a very robust solution that vshosting~ have been using for years in dozens of instances. The application servers communicate with the SQL database via a load balancer, where the Maxscale component facilitates the distribution of the SQL query among nodes. For NoSQL data, ElasticSearch was chosen, with which the applications communicate directly and the load distribution is conducted by the driver inside the application. The trio of servers is designed as N+1, so for full functionality, the operation of 2 servers is needed. 

According to Pilulka’s requirements, the solution design was implemented in full redundancy mode, with an emphasis on the possibility of further growth which reflects Pilulka’s rapid expansion both on the Czech market and abroad.