iBOOD handles 15x more traffic with MongoDB Atlas

THE CHALLENGE

Modernizing backend e-commerce operations

iBOOD (Internet’s Best Online Offer Daily) is a top 50 Benelux e-commerce website. Operating in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Poland, and France, it specializes in daily deals and limited flash sales on goods ranging from electronics and gadgets to lifestyle products and appliances.

Between 2009 and 2025, consumers voted iBOOD the Netherlands’ Best Website of the Year. What started as a single daily deal has grown to up to 6,000 unique deals daily, relying on a dynamic product catalog and strong partnerships with suppliers. That’s not all—iBOOD’s website is located in six countries and translated into five different languages.

In addition to handling more than one million sessions a day from 400,000 active customers, iBOOD runs quarterly promotions called ‘the Hunt’, which cause traffic spikes 15 times larger than usual as new deals drop every few minutes. 

“It’s increasingly difficult to make a profit in the e-commerce sector. We wanted to launch a new website, new app, new domain, and set up a new backend to support it all while keeping the shop open with virtually no downtime,” said Wouter van Bakel, solutions architect at iBOOD.

OUR SOLUTION

Scaling to handle 15x growth in traffic

iBOOD began looking for a managed cloud database platform and decided on MongoDB Atlas. As van Bakel said, “We looked at other solutions, but none were as stable as MongoDB. It’s a high-quality product and it’s a big advantage that it’s cloud agnostic—we host it on Google Cloud.”

The implementation happened alongside a wider transformation as iBOOD adopted a lean, more efficient microservices architecture. The team no longer needs to manage updates manually, which saves a significant amount of time, and it can turn to MongoDB for support as and when it needs it.

“Every second counts when things go wrong. Our systems went down during the Hunt, and MongoDB immediately jumped in to help us. We worked together over shared screens to fix the issue in less than two hours,” said van Bakel. “We learned a lot of lessons that helped us improve our environment outside MongoDB, so it was really valuable support.”

With MongoDB Atlas, each region has its own database, and each shop has its own collection for deals, collections, and content. On top of this, the platform supports a multi-tenant architecture that cleanly separates data and workloads. As a result, traffic spikes can be handled at the regional level without needing to auto-scale all databases at once.

“MongoDB Atlas makes managing multi-country content much easier,” said van Bakel. “Just one line of code enables us to give customers from each country a localized shopping experience.”

To simplify catalog management, iBOOD uses domain-driven design. It has one product catalog for the whole company and regional collections containing the pricing for each country. When an offer goes live, an automated process matches the product details with the correct pricing for that region. 

The company also used MongoDB Atlas Search to set up a multilingual search index, and MongoDB Compass to develop aggregations. It plans to move its data warehouse and business reports onto MongoDB, eliminating the need to duplicate data into a third-party solution.

OUTCOME

Stable, reliable database underpinning sales

Since migrating to MongoDB Atlas, iBOOD has a stable, reliable, auto-scaling database platform to support everyday offers and peak moments during the Hunt. iBOOD’s websites can manage up to 15 times more traffic if needed, and the company only pays for the compute resource it uses at any given time.

“We have way more control over scaling now, which means we can control costs,” van Bakel said. “There’s just no competition—MongoDB is nothing but stable, and I’ve seen things go wrong with other databases that you couldn’t even imagine!”

Of a 14-person IT team, the company needs just half of one full-time employee (FTE) to manage its databases. Software builds, tests, checks and deployments are fully automated, with updates and MongoDB index changes pushed to production up to 50 times per day. With less time spent managing the platform, the rest of the team can focus on building new features that deliver business value.

iBOOD is planning to further expand its use of MongoDB, and is considering adding additional levels of abstraction to the database to support a new SaaS business model. With this architecture, new tenants can be onboarded in under an hour using MongoDB Atlas. And if the company decides to go multi-cloud, it already has a cloud-agnostic database platform.

“The more we can centralize on MongoDB, the better it is for security. We have a superior connection with a built-in failsafe to prevent unauthorized access,” said van Bakel. “If you want a stable, enterprise-level database platform, go for MongoDB. It’s the best I’ve ever worked with.”