180.no

With more than 100 000 daily users across Norway,
180.no is one of the most popular online services
in the country.

Being an exhaustive database of Norwegian businesses and individuals, it allows consumers
and companies to effectively search for service providers across specified categories.

Alternatively, 180.no is a powerful tool that helps local businesses to reach their audiences and win the market.

The mobile app version is a caller ID and call blocker app, that allows users to identify, review and blacklist unwanted and suspicious calls.

Advista AS partners with Caddiesoft on full-stack web and back-end mobile app development, as well as UX/UI design.

100.000+

daily users

3.5 M+

app downloads

Subsidiary of Norwegian Advista AS

(AAA-rated)

Collaboration model

Dedicated development team

Project duration and status

10 years, ongoing

Background

When Caddiesoft started collaboration on the project, there already was a functioning platform developed and released by the client.

The initial request was to upgrade the product by means of a complete redesign and introduction of advanced features.

In 2011, Caddiesoft team released a new version of 180.no, with all the requirements and specifications implemented. Once launched, the service became extremely popular across Norway and scaled exponentially, which introduced new challenges and requirements for the development team. The process of working on these issues led to the creation of a brand new version that was deployed in 2019.

Challenges and solutions

The main challenges the final release addressed were:

1. Increased high load

With approximately 50 requests per second, 180.no is a high load system, and it is important that it handles all the incoming traffic without failures. To make that happen, Caddiesoft team implemented the following solutions:

The use of .NET Core as the main framework. It allows the team to execute system updates faster and outperforms .NET 4.6.1, the previous framework used to run 180.no.
Verbose logging and tracing of all the components through AAI and Raygun tools.
The active use of PRTG in the monitoring process, which allows the development team to promptly respond to all potential issues.

2. Horizontal scaling

After the release in 2011, the service scaled and evolved into a complex and sophisticated system, with new subsystems and components being added on a constant basis. As a result, there was a need for more advanced and elaborate tools and approaches.

Solutions

A new optimized architecture aimed at disaggregation of the whole system into small, independent and lightweight components that are much easier to scale and maintain.
Clusterization of the web applications, components and data sources across several server nodes using F5 BIG-IP load balancer. This load splitting approach allows to process more requests, increase capacities and robustness of our systems, and achieve zero downtime within the maintenance processes.

3. Data security issues

Like all the databases out there, 180.no carries enormous amounts of personal data that often becomes a target for trespassers, crawlers and DDoS attacks. As a result, data security is one of the major concerns the client has and should be addressed accordingly.

Solutions

New ways of IP protection were implemented, classified into 3 categories, according to the type of protection. They are geo-based IP filters, manual black- and whitelists and automated locking of the suspiciously active user agents. The IP protection process also consists of several complementary components, which are SQL databases, OS scheduled tasks and API storage ranges.

4. New business
requirements

For 9 years since the release in 2011, Caddiesoft team has been improving and refining the platform to meet the ever changing trends, user needs, and must haves in the world of technology. This process included recurring redesign, adding new features, upgrading functionality and many more.

The main updates featured in the new version:

Phone number lookup feature
This feature allows users to search for companies or individuals by a phone number.
All the information is collected and updated from both internal and external data sources, and then managed using NoSQL engines (Couchbase and MongoDB tools).
Free business pages
Now service-providers can have their own business pages within the platform, with a unique domain name, easy management tools and constant support. There are around 2000 business pages hosted on 180.no servers at the moment.
Geolocation-based features
The platform allows users to find companies based in certain areas, as well as segment profiles according to their location.To run this service we actively use MaxMind databases, Google geo-location, as well as our own geo-related databases.
New mobile-friendly design
One of the requirements from the client was complete redesign of the platform, with all the latest trends and needs of a user taken into consideration. Now 180.no is mobile-friendly and features user-centered and intuitive [design].

Tech stack

Language | Framework | Monitoring and performance management

Databases | Servers

Team

Testimonials

"Being a part of the 180.no team is all about challenging and interesting projects, where the ultimate goal isn’t just the project performance, but also the code and architecture quality as a whole. As a result, any further support and maintenance of such projects is always clear and streamlined".

Ivan

.NET software developer, 180.no team