GoGrid Blog

Today the Internet was abuzz with the latest Steve Jobs’ Keynote address at the Apple World Wide Developers Conference, so much so that Twitter was brought to its knees and other blogging sites were overwhelmed with repeated traffic requests. I watch the action on a variety of sources (pictures and text from Engadget and Audio being streamed through uStream). It was a bit painful having to manual refresh or have audio drop during the keynote speech, but the announcements were eventually heard world-wide.

This post is not about the iPhone though but rather about a new GoGrid customer who was recently written up on TechCrunch, ScribbleLive. ScribbleLive is an Ajax-based, Live Blogging platform that enables authors to cover live events in a real-time manner. Billed as a “media rich conference call” ScribbleLive provides audiences an immersive experience on browsers and mobile devices alike, pushing text, links, pictures and videos instantly without the need to constantly reload the browser page.

What makes this story noteworthy is that ScribbleLive is a true, bootstrapped startup. The company, founded by Jonathan Keebler and Michael De Monte, was put together for about $1500. They are only 2 employees but have set up an infrastructure of a well-established company, with GoGrid powering their Application and Database servers and Akamai providing the CDN (content delivery network).

During the WWDC event, they ran their own “System Status” LiveBlog to keep users up to date on the systems powering other users live-blogging. Some highlights:

• The day before the event they were getting 181,000+ page views
• Throughput before, during and after the event ranged between 1.3 to 4.6 Mbits/sec
• Front-end servers maintained 2% CPU utilization
• Database server peaked at 7% CPU utilization
• 1.5 hours before the event, 1+ unique visitors/sec were accessing the site

I asked Jonathan Keebler some questions about how GoGrid was used so successfully with ScribbleLive and here is what he said:

Question: How many GoGrid Servers were you using?
Answer: Two web servers and one database server all with 1GB RAM each

Q: What were the configurations of the servers?
A: All were running Windows Server 2003 and the Database Server was SQL Server 2005

Q: How was your system architecture set up?
A: Akamai took all of the traffic on the edge, using GoGrid as the “origin server”

Q: How many Live Blogs covered the event?
A: There were seven blogs running simultaneously with over 40 writers

Q: What is the anticipated cost for the event?
A: Whatever GoGrid costs for the day [author’s note: 3 - 1 GB servers running for 24 hours = approx. $15 for the day, not including SQL Server or Bandwidth charges)

From Jonathan:

“Being a startup with extremely spiky traffic around large live events, we were looking for a dedicated hosting option that could scale with us. Working with GoGrid, we were able to bring online as many servers as we needed to cover our big events. By being able to manage our own load-balancers with fault-tolerance, we were able to ensure that we maintained high availability under large traffic volume.”

Note: you can follow some of Jonathan’s GoGrid comments on his blog here and here.

Congratulations to ScribbleLive their success with WWDC as well as handling a potentially network crippling event with ease using GoGrid!

This note was sent to us by a new GoGrid user (Hareem Haque) and frankly it scared us. But then we read on further in the note:

“Honestly speaking. Your GoGrid is all false advertising. It does a whole lot more then what is stated on the site. I ran a CentOS 4.4 server yesterday for a brief but crucial period. The unit itself gave me no headaches. I simply installed all my apps. And off we were testing the app with our clients. Everything worked fine and flawlessly. Thanks to the load balancer we did some load tests. And I could not find anything bad about GoGrid. I am going to start moving my EC2 instance applications over to GoGrid. “

Hareem, who works in Telecommunications in Canada, currently has 4 Amazon Machine Images (AMI’s) running on Amazon’s EC2 (all clones) running as a clustered FTP server and is now in the process of replicating this environment on GoGrid. He set up a CentOS 4.4 server on GoGrid and installed vsftpd on it and ran some tests of 10 - 20MB Flash Video Files (.flv) , moving then to 2 - 100MB Window Media Video (.wmv) files and finally 1 - 1GB MPEG-4 (.mp4) file. He got a throughput of 10mbps with GoGrid and only 7mbps with EC2. With these solid benchmarks, he’s moving forward with more GoGrid servers now.

He also said he was extremely happy that there was no charge for the load-balancing and that it “came in handy.”

This is just one of many positive examples that are starting to come in or are appearing on the web. Do you have a success story or a unique use of GoGrid? If so, I want to know! So what are you waiting for? Get a GoGrid account now!