The client
Dexerto is an award‑winning digital media group and one of the world’s leading destinations for esports, gaming and digital culture, with tens of millions of monthly visitors across site and social.
The flagship site, www.dexerto.com, attracts several million visits per month and serves a highly engaged, mobile‑heavy audience of gamers and fans.
Dexerto operates multiple language verticals and channels, publishing content around the clock to a global audience from hubs in London and other international locations.
The challenge
Dexerto needed guaranteed 24/7 cover for critical production incidents on a global, always-on gaming media estate. They required strict P1 SLAs (30-minute response, 4-hour target resolution) because any outage threatened audience reach and advertising revenue.
Coming from a Vercel plus WP Engine setup, they were struggling with spiralling cloud costs and unpredictable monthly overages, particularly as AI bots drove traffic-related usage and charges.
They also wanted to move to a modern, managed AWS hosting platform with multiple production and non-production environments spanning services such as Fargate, RDS, S3, CloudFront, and Lambda.
This needed a clear split between 24/7 critical infrastructure support and in-hours service requests, and a phased approach that could first stabilise WordPress back ends and then bring customer-facing Next.js sites across without disrupting millions of fans.
The solution
JAM, an AWS Advanced Partner, designed a two-phase, largely lift-and-shift migration from Vercel and WP Engine to a managed AWS platform running WordPress back ends and a heavily cached Next.js front end.
The team first moved Dexerto’s WordPress back ends for four main sites onto AWS, then began onboarding the customer-facing sites, starting with dexerto.es and CharlieIntel, a leading Call of Duty news property.
Around this, JAM delivers 24/7 incident management from global locations, underpinned by a comprehensive IaaS support offering that covers compliance, cost management, security and core infrastructure operations (provisioning, scaling, backup, recovery and configuration).
Service Components included:
- P1 incident response: 30 minutes acknowledgement, 4-hour resolution target
- Service requests: 30 minutes acknowledgement, 48-hour resolution (UK office hours)
- Monthly reporting with incident analysis and recommendations
- Real-time monitoring via Site24x7 for all production server health
- Dedicated support channels (email, phone, Slack) with ticketing system
- Post-incident reports for all P1 issues
Ongoing cost optimisation and detailed spend reporting are used to rein in previous overages and give Dexerto far greater visibility and predictability over their monthly cloud spend.
JAM also implemented autoscaling for ECS tasks, migrating secrets to AWS Secrets Manager, restricting IAM permissions, and enforcing read-only file system access.
The results
Dexerto signed with JAM in December 2024. By July 2025, 24/7 cover was already live and ramping up to de-risk the final cut-over. The platform went fully live in September 2025.
Since resolving early application-level issues that surfaced during the first phase, the WordPress back ends and initial Next.js sites (dexerto.es and CharlieIntel) have achieved consistently high uptime.
As part of the managed service, JAM conducts proactive quarterly business reviews for Dexerto, combining security scanning, cost optimisation analysis and risk assessment with clear, prioritised recommendations.
Dexerto now has far greater visibility over their infrastructure costs, with the unpredictable monthly overages that plagued their previous setup.
JAM works directly with Dexerto’s in-house technical lead to handle incidents, untangle application versus infrastructure issues and provide clearer cost and platform insight. The managed service remains in place with regular account reviews, demonstrating this is an ongoing, strategic engagement rather than a one-off migration.
