How Gi Group Holding runs HTTPS redirects across 400 domains with a 2-person IT team
Samuele Citterio | IT Network Manager at Gi Group Holding
Gi Group Holding is an Italian HR and staffing multinational with five commercial brands operating across about thirty-five countries. Its web presence runs on roughly four hundred domain variants, most of which host no website. They redirect: discontinued brands to their successor, country variants to the regional flagship, old campaign shortcuts that still pull traffic.
A two-person IT team owns all of it. For years the redirects ran on a custom internal setup: web services doing 301 forwarding through regex rules. It worked, but only over HTTP. When a visitor explicitly typed the HTTPS prefix, the certificate didn't match and the browser showed a warning. Once HTTPS became the default a few years ago, that gap started to bite.
They moved the portfolio to redirect.pizza. A new redirect now takes minutes instead of twenty, certificates renew themselves, and the team opens the console about twice a year. "No effort, big results", says IT Network Manager Samuele Citterio.
At a glance
- 400 domain variants centrally managed by a 2-person IT team
- Running on the Pro plan, 80 of 100 source hostnames in use
- 25 redirects in 90 minutes on the most recent rebrand, where the old setup took 20 minutes each
- No more certificate-related marketing complaints since the migration, zero support tickets
400 domains, two engineers
A long tail of sub-brands, acquired or launched over the years, sits underneath the five main brands. Samuele Citterio, the IT Network Manager who owns it, puts the count at four hundred domain variants in total, all managed centrally by IT.
Most carry no primary website. They redirect: a discontinued brand to the one that absorbed it, a country variant to the regional flagship, a years-old campaign shortcut that still pulls enough traffic that breaking it would draw complaints. No single redirect is critical. Together they carry traffic that Gi Group can't afford to lose silently.
That work sits with Samuele and one colleague, a fifteen-year IT Network Manager and a recent junior hire. Domains, DNS, redirects, and certificates all land on their desk.
Why this gap kept costing time
The HTTPS-warning issue surfaced through marketing, not through any audit. Country teams would catch a certificate error on a legacy domain right before a campaign launched. Samuele's team fixed each case, but the setup never structurally changed. Doing it properly meant building a certificate lifecycle into the scripts: Let's Encrypt or a paid CA, automated renewal, error handling for the renewals that quietly fail. Across four hundred domains, that was an engineering project on top of the day job.
Every new redirect took about twenty minutes to configure. Small in isolation, but twenty redirects for a rebrand cost most of a working day.
No procurement cycle, no sign-off chain
Samuele searched for a "TLD redirect solution", and landed on redirect.pizza. He opened a free account, configured five domains, and ran them for two weeks. He moved to the paid Pro plan without a procurement cycle or sign-off chain, and runs about eighty of his hundred source hostnames today.
I had a redirect solution, but it meant writing scripts. Now, it is way more easy. I can delegate this to others if necessary. No effort, big results.
What the work looks like now
redirect.pizza doesn't host Gi Group's DNS or touch the rest of the stack. It is the redirect-and-certificate layer, with automatic HTTPS SSL via Let's Encrypt on every redirect. Point a domain at it and move on.
Nearly three years in, Samuele opens the console only to add a redirect. "Before the most recent batch, my last login was six months ago", Samuele says. No maintenance, no renewal alerts, no broken redirects to chase.
Marketing hasn't flagged a certificate problem since the migration, the team hasn't opened a support ticket, and nobody thinks about Let's Encrypt rate limits or renewal cron jobs anymore.
It helps you manage the redirects in a quick and enjoyable way, without having to worry about lifecycles, certificates, scripts, and so on.
How to size a redirect tool for a large domain portfolio
The procurement reflex is that a big organization needs a big tool. Four hundred domains across thirty-five countries looks like a job for Cloudflare or AWS. redirect.pizza is a different category: it doesn't host your DNS or try to be a platform. It does domain-to-domain redirects with automatic HTTPS underneath. For a team that already owns its DNS and needs only that layer, the narrow scope is the point.
The fit is narrow but well-defined. If you manage a lot of brands, domains, and legacy redirects, redirect.pizza handles it without procurement weight. If you don't have that kind of portfolio, you probably don't need it. It's for the IT team that already knows it has a domain-redirect problem and wants to stop solving it from scratch.
Simple requirements, simple solution. That is it for me.
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