Pitchero is the premier digital platform for sports clubs seeking high performance websites, mobile apps, payment processing, video content sharing, and club management tools.
Industry
Media and entertainment
Use Cases
EdgeSSL™ certification
Key Takeaways
By implementing StackPath EdgeSSL, Pitchero scaled SSL certificate protection to thousands of customers, each one with their own sports club domain. The result is highly reliable security that deploys quickly, accompanied by an attractive utility-based pricing model.
- Provides SSL certificate protection to thousands of customers
- Uses API for programmatic configuration as well as utility billing
- Configures the domain and SSL automatically
Situation
Growing digital platform serving thousands of domains
With millions of registered users, Pitchero is the premier digital platform for grassroots and semi-professional sports clubs in the UK and Ireland. With mobile apps, club database management, payment collection & processing, game scheduling capability, and a mobile video capture tool, sports clubs use Pitchero to enhance their membership experience and grow revenue.
As Pitchero provides each club with its own domain name, the company needed to scale SSL certification to thousands of separate domains to deliver the highest level of service.
Objective
Scale SSL certification quickly within cost constraints
With dynamic websites and mobile apps, Pitchero’s sports club customers leverage the benefits of a standalone domain. Due to the collection of personal data and payment processes, SSL certification is a high priority for these clubs that want to maintain a high level of trust with their members.
The Pitchero team knew that providing SSL was fundamental to their business growth and the brand needed to deploy at scale without a large expense. As Pitchero rolled out its new V6 platform, SSL certification was a technical must have.
Approach
Find the right SSL solution at the right price
Initially, Pitchero considered writing an in-house solution for SSL at scale. However, it quickly became evident that this would generate high cost and a steady drain of maintenance resources. Also, the company’s cloud provider (AWS) did not offer a viable option for SSL termination at the edge.
An alternative option was to configure thousands of separate Amazon CloudFront distributions. But this went against AWS recommendations and would have led to untenable management of CloudFront distributions which are slow to setup, difficult to reconfigure, and costly.
Pitchero’s leadership team was aware of StackPath’s upward trajectory so they decided to reach out. StackPath’s high performance record and attractive utility-based pricing sealed the deal.
“The product guys were extremely helpful during the transition. StackPath engineers are super responsive and provide fast answers.”
Jon Milsom, Founder & CTO, Pitchero
Results
SSL certification at scale
Now, Pitchero provides EdgeSSL solutions to every paid customer, no matter their size. Also, StackPath enables Pitchero to configure the domain and SSL automatically with no need for their customers to get involved.
EdgeSSL runs through StackPath’s content delivery network (CDN) which Pitchero can leverage as the brand advances into the wider EU and Asian markets. With large volumes of content, users, and domains, Pitchero has experienced occasional performance-related problems due to web spiders. To mitigate this, the platform can easily activate StackPath’s web application firewall (WAF) to further optimize UX for tens of thousands of sports club enthusiasts.
We use StackPath’s API for programmatic configuration and utility billing on our platform and we look forward to using more of their stack in the future.”
Jon Milsom • Founder & CTO, Pitchero