A decade and a half of infrastructure development behind one of Hungary's largest classified ad portals

The client

Jófogás is one of Hungary’s largest classified ad platforms, on the market since 2010. The company now has 70 employees. The platform offers not only marketplace listings but also real estate, vehicle and job ads, more than 1.5 million in total. The popularity of the web and mobile application is shown by the fact that the listings uploaded to the platform reach close to 2 million internet users a month. They have close to 80 servers, hosted and operated by Andrews IT Engineering, to keep the processes running smoothly and to store and serve the listing data.

The Head of Engineering

Levente Jónás has been working at Jófogás for more than 10 years. He started as a developer, then led the development team. As the company transformed, he began working with an ever larger cross-functional team responsible for a wider range of the platform’s tasks. In 2024 he was appointed Head of Engineering, and the entire development team has reported to him since.

A cooperation spanning a decade and a half

The teams of Jófogás and Andrews IT Engineering have been working together since 2011. The first step of the joint work was to solve the bandwidth problem of the system running abroad, for which Andrews provided image cache servers in its VPS service. In 2012 Jófogás decided to move the whole system to Hungary, and this is where the joint work that continues to this day began. After the move, with the support of Andrews, the system running today took shape through further migrations resulting from mergers (for example Expressz.hu, OLX (Aprod.hu), Használtautó).

Over the years an efficient cooperation has developed between the two companies: every year Andrews draws up a list of optimisation and efficiency improvements for Jófogás. The Jófogás development team prioritises these and schedules them alongside its annual projects. Most of the items on the list are carried out by the Andrews team, but there are items where they work together with Jófogás’s own developers. These also allow them to reduce operating costs or improve the quality of service.

Where data is the most valuable asset

The most important part of a classified ad portal is the listings database. Upgrading and maintaining Jófogás’s high-availability PostgreSQL database is a task of the highest priority, carried out with the support of Andrews.

Every such step requires lengthy planning and testing. Major changes and version upgrades are first tried out in a test environment set up for this purpose, and only then moved to production. Changes affecting the production environment can only be made at night, in the least busy period. Andrews is flexibly at Jófogás’s disposal in this too, within its 24/7 support.

Several services in one hand, and further benefits

Over the years, as its needs grew, Jófogás entrusted the Andrews team with more and more tasks, which currently cover the infrastructure, Linux operations, the firewall and the load balancer. Thanks to the close cooperation, the flexibility and the expertise of the engineers, Jófogás only has to keep in touch with a single team that knows its systems inside out, which takes a significant burden off its shoulders.

The flexibility of Andrews is also shown by the fact that, when needed, they help the Jófogás team beyond the frame agreed in the cooperation, for example in DevOps tasks or code-level analysis.

Trust unbroken after a change of ownership

Jófogás went through a change of ownership in 2023. The fact that they continued working with Andrews afterwards, and count on them in the future too, proves that Andrews represents significant added value for the client. Levente Jónás also revealed that they currently have future operations-related projects they plan to entrust to the Andrews specialists, such as various cloud services.