We have built the new Bezrealitky for you

We have been developing the Bezrealitky portal since 2007, and over that time we have delivered several major redesigns and thousands of smaller changes for its users. The platform behind the previous version was defined in 2014, so over time it inevitably became outdated. The world of online technologies changes fast, and best practices have shifted so much since 2014 that further development and optimization of the original platform hit its limits.

Bezrealitky therefore commissioned a concept and visual style for the new version of the portal, and iD-SIGN was once again responsible for the technical implementation of the whole vision. Based on our previous good experience, we recommended working with Superkoders on the templates, and as the base platform for the frontend part of the application we chose a combination of NextJS and React-Bootstrap, thanks to their support for SSR and SSG. Although a lot could be said against using Bootstrap as a foundation, in the long run its large community gives us access to many community components and thus speeds up development. On the backend we stayed true to PHP, Symfony, GraphQL, RabbitMQ and MariaDB. The entire application is also built on open-source solutions so that Bezrealitky is not exposed to any vendor lock-in. The whole application is monitored with Sentry, Telegraf, InfluxDB and Grafana. Initial development of the NextJS application was carried out with AWS Lambda in mind, but we ran into a lack of support for the latest NextJS features on AWS, with no guarantee they would be added quickly. With Vercel Cloud, we were not able to estimate the resulting costs even roughly, which led to the pragmatic decision to keep using servers at VSHosting. Nor did we consider dockerization, or a private Kubernetes cluster for the backend, to be worthwhile. Should support for a cloud solution become necessary in the future, it can be added to both the frontend and the backend.

Development of the new version was given very little time, so it was planned in several phases with the idea that features would be added gradually. More than 2,800 hours of development, management and testing culminated on May 26, 2022, which had been set as D-Day. The launch was preceded by a migration to a new server infrastructure, a change of the database structure (a migration with more than 1,600,000 queries), DNS record changes, internal testing of the complete functionality and the subsequent generation of more than 1,000,000 new image thumbnails for listings in AVIF, WebP and JPG formats. For these reasons the portal was first switched to an inactive mode, and although we tried to keep this period as short as possible, the portal could still respond slowly for several hours after the launch. For pragmatic reasons, we preferred to get rid of many historical relics right away at the cost of a short period of limited availability, rather than keep carrying a lot of historical baggage.

With the launch of the new version, the Android and iOS apps that used the old API also stopped working. However, the new portal was developed as a PWA, so you can install it on your phone or computer directly from the browser. PWA support is available on all major platforms, including Android, iOS, Windows, macOS and Linux.

If you like Bezrealitky, take a look at how we build websites – we will be happy to create a similar website for you too.