The Next Web

Animoto: When scalability becomes a matter of prosperity or death

Written on May 15, 2008 – 2:13 pm
Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of The Next Web Conference

Earlier we reported about Animoto, but that was before they launched their Facebook app. Werner Vogels, CTO Amazon is presenting at Next08 and started of by showing a short movie he made on Animoto followed by the Animoto fairytale.

Animoto was running on Amazon EC2 server and was using 50 servers when they had 25.000 users (note that their technology needs a lot of compute power). Probably most of you were already users then.

Now it becomes interesting. The day they launched their Facebook app, they signed up 25.000 new users per HOUR, resulting in the need of scaling to 3500 servers within 2 days. If it wasn’t for Amazon Animoto would have gone down and missed the million new users which would probably be the end of this great service.

I wonder how long it would take to call Dell, get the country manager on the line and negotiate a deal on buying 3500 new servers, meanwhile calling your local data center telling them you’re buying all their space immediately and order him to start building a new data center next to it…. I’m not sure but my guess is it takes more then two days and then I’m not talking about the costs of such a process and the opportunity costs of all those new Pro accounts.

Breaking news: Amazon invests in Animoto! Good call Jeff and Werner

Save 5 dollars on a signup (and give me 3 months extra :)) via the referral code: oqilswmk

I hope you like that post!

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amazon, Amazon EC2, animoto, next08, scalability

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Amazon Web Services: Lower Data Transfer Costs

Written on April 23, 2008 – 4:59 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur

Werner Vogels, CTO Amazon at The Next Web Conference in 2008.

One of the hot companies here in San Francisco is not a start-up but a well established company who launched a new service that almost every new hot start-up seems to rely on. I’m talking about the Amazon Web Hosting services.

The May issue of Wired magazine features an interesting story about the ideas behind offering this service and Amazon’s vision for the future. One quote from Jeff Bezos I liked:

‘You don’t generate your own electricity, why generate your own computing?’

Today Amazon announces that they will lower the cost of their hosting platform even further. As they explain: ‘We’ve often told you that one of our goals is to drive down costs continuously and to pass those savings on to you. We have been able to reduce our costs for data transfer, so we’re pleased to announce that we’re lowering our pricing for data transfer, effective May 1, 2008. You’ll notice below that we’ve reduced price at every existing usage tier of transfer out, as well as added an additional tier for the heaviest users.’ Here are the old and new prices:

Current data transfer price (through April 30, 2008)
$0.100 per GB - data transfer in
$0.180 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.160 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.130 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TB

New data transfer price (effective May 1, 2008)
$0.100 per GB - data transfer in
$0.170 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.130 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.110 per GB - next 100 TB / month data transfer out
$0.100 per GB - data transfer out / month over 150 TB

Unfortunately data transferred between Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3-Europe will be charged at regular rates which is kind of a bummer for European companies thinking of switching to Amazon S3.

With the new pricing structure some clients will be able to save as much as 26% of their monthly bandwidth fees.

Amazon EC2, Amazon S3-Europe, Data Transfer Costs

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