top of page

TimeBucks Moves to AWS, Cutting Costs and Unlocking Scalability


TimeBucks (timebucks.com) is a global digital advertising and publishing platform, connecting publishers and advertisers around the world through a rewards-based model.



Prior to moving to AWS, TimeBucks operated on four dedicated IBM bare-metal servers housed in a third-party co-location facility. While this setup provided a degree of stability, it became increasingly limiting as the business grew. The current platform provided no elasticity, no managed services, and no disaster recovery capability. The IBM hardware was also approaching end-of-vendor-support, adding urgency to the decision to find a more sustainable and scalable platform.


Several key challenges drove their decision to migrate:

  • High fixed costs with no elasticity: TimeBucks was paying for dedicated resources regardless of actual usage, with no ability to scale down during quieter periods.

  • No autoscaling: PHP and Node.js workloads could not scale horizontally on fixed bare-metal capacity, making it impossible to absorb seasonal advertising traffic spikes without pre-provisioning additional hardware.

  • No disaster recovery: A single-site architecture meant any hardware failure was a full service outage.

  • IBM hardware end-of-vendor-support: The bare-metal fleet was approaching end of vendor support, making ongoing security patching and hardware maintenance increasingly costly and uncertain.


The migration:

PurePlay Cloud delivered the migration over a 6-week engagement, rehosting the PHP web tier onto EC2 Graviton instances and modernising the Node.js API layer onto ECS Fargate containers. The MySQL databases were migrated to Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Multi-AZ, and the existing Nginx/Varnish caching layer was replaced with Amazon CloudFront and AWS WAF. AWS GuardDuty, Amazon ElastiCache (Redis), and a new Terraform-based infrastructure-as-code foundation completed the build, with production cutover executed in May 2025 followed by a 30-day hypercare period before the IBM infrastructure was retired.


Feedback from the customer:

Benefits we’ve realised:- “Autoscaling is awesome, and has saved us a lot of money.” and “We’re so glad we made the move over to AWS.”

Anthony Lipari, Co-Founder, TimeBucks


Benefits we've realized:

  • Elastic scaling: Auto-scaling groups and ECS Fargate tasks now scale automatically with advertising demand, eliminating the cost of idle pre-provisioned capacity and removing the risk of being caught underpowered during traffic spikes.

  • Significant cost reduction: Transitioning from on-premises to an on-demand AWS structure has resulted in a substantial reduction of over 34% in infrastructure spend. This change also includes the benefits of managed services disaster recovery and security tooling.

  • Improved reliability: Multi-AZ Aurora and ECS Fargate task self-healing eliminate the single points of failure that previously caused 3–4 hours of monthly downtime.

  • Enterprise-grade security: AWS WAF, GuardDuty, and centralised IAM Identity Centre provide a security posture that was simply not achievable on the previous bare-metal platform.

 
 
bottom of page