CollegeHippo

We are proud to announce that CollegeHippo is an AWS EdStart member now. Our application got accepted and we got awarded a $10,000 credits.

• We do not pay for the servers and infrastructure for the next one- year. Good savings
• We can scale our applications to serve the students better. Which means less downtime, rolling upgrades, and fast loading pages
• We can get the latest updates because have better infrastructure to support our requirements.

We had applied to some other program and got rejected initially. Reapplied and provided missing details. They were looking for company registration and to prove it was a legal entity.

After 2 months AWS EdStart team reached out to us and asked us to apply for AWS EdStart program.
A detailed long application and it took time to fill in the details.
Got approved in 10 days.!

I had spent a great amount of time on engineering side of the product, trying to aggregate the courses information, extract gre and GPA scores, build the scholarship etc. Did not pay much attention to my traffic. I was think if you build, they will come. Sadly, it does not work like that.
From March 2020, I started paying attention to keywords for which I was getting traffic, what users are looking for and started optimizing the pages. I fixed duplicate titles, common SEO mistakes that were hurting my site. Starting answering users questions on forums before sharing links.
All this has shown an increase in traffic on the site.
Next milestone 50k monthly users.

The site was public with home page and college page contents but not all the pages were ready. There were too many mistakes on the site, servers were crashing and the crawlers were getting stuck. It took time for us to solve all the technical issues and launch the completed site to users.