Meet Elgentos, our first client. As a boutique e-commerce agency, Elgentos offers e-commerce custom solutions, created with Magento 2 back-ends, in combination with Laravel based micro-services and React components. Founder and CTO Peter Jaap Blaakmeer shares his story about how GitLabHost helps them make sure things run smoothly.
The company
“We take care of the whole process of building an online store for our customers. Our work is mostly B2B-focused and our customers are very often manufacturers of custom products. And we create custom integration and automation solutions for them. Anything ranging from integration with a product information system, product customization, warehouse management or factory orders and shipping automation. In other words, we can streamline their entire production, order and shipping process through their online store.”
The challenge
“When we started using GitLab, we pretty much knew right away that self-hosting was the best option for us, in terms of privacy and security for our customers, but also to have more control when deploying runners to test everything before new functionality goes live. But we didn’t want the hassle of hosting GitLab ourselves. Hosting is a whole different skill set. We don’t do it for our clients and we don’t want to do it for our own company, because it will inevitably mean getting up in the middle of the night to fix things when a server goes down. We also didn’t want to rely on someone else for backups and self-hosting gave us that option.”
“With GitLabHost, we don’t have to worry about the hosting part, which is great for us.”
Peter Jaap Blaakmeer | Founder and CTO
The fix
“With GitLabHost, we don’t have to worry about the hosting part, which is great for us. The online stores we build are highly customized and tailored to very specific needs. That means a lot of rigorous testing before it can go live. Things like security for payment integration for example, or making sure Google can still index the store, you name it. We don’t have to wait for a GitLab runner to become available (which is often the case with the SaaS version), we have 10 of our own runners immediately available whenever we need them. Another thing I love is the custom feature GitLabHost created for us. Normally, GitLab automatically closes an issue when you merge the corresponding merge request. Convenient, but not ideal for us, because we want our customers to have a final check. GitLabHost helped us take care of that problem.”
