ReelSurfer Picks Joyent for Reliability and Cost Savings

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwire - Sep 6, 2012) - Joyent, the high-performance cloud infrastructure company, today announced that Joyent Cloud has been selected by online video clip and sharing service ReelSurfer as its IT platform. ReelSurfer chose Joyent over Amazon Web Services (AWS) for its ability to scale instantly and 99.9999% uptime to meet the demands of a new and rapidly-growing customer base.

ReelSurfer's free online video service is data-intensive and has to be ready to meet the demands of unpredictable user behavior. Outages simply aren't an option. Downtime means dollars lost, and that can be the difference between a viable business and a startup that doesn't get off the ground. Because of this, ReelSurfer sought an infrastructure solution to meet the unique demands of its business, guarding against sluggish performance or outages in the face of usage spikes, enabling ReelSurfer to easily add memory power and storage space to meet rapid growth, and doing it all while allowing the company to customize the infrastructure freely to meet its needs.

After evaluating AWS and other cloud infrastructure options, ReelSurfer decided on Joyent for better performance, uptime and a more comprehensive and hands on service experience for its revenue critical app. ReelSurfer implemented Joyent Cloud in the lead-up to its public beta and was able to immediately scale up an influx of new users smoothly and without incident. In addition to handling this initial surge, Joyent Cloud also enables ReelSurfer to:

• Handle hundreds of thousands of hits per day. ReelSurfer's traffic is doubling week-over-week, but the company has total peace of mind that Joyent will keep the service running. And ReelSurfer can easily modify resources on existing virtual machines to meet demand.
• Deploy new resources at will. ReelSurfer can quickly and easily deploy more back-end video encoding application servers as its user base grows.
• Innovate within the technology stack. ReelSurfer is trying to disrupt video consumption, and while some of its ideas will work on a standard application stack, others require the company to install a bunch of different modules on a web server and tweak the Apache installation. And a one-size-fits-all cloud provider wouldn't have provided the flexibility to do that like Joyent has.
• Save money. ReelSurfer started off with a Joyent Cloud infrastructure plan geared toward baseline demand, and then scaled up in precise units as needed. Because of Joyent's flexible pricing and the fact that it does not charge for bursts in CPU usage, ReelSurfer has never had to over-provision for spikes, saving thousands of dollars in the process. For a start up, that's real money.

"Our service is incredibly data-intensive and it's subject to tremendous spikes in usage. And today's infrastructure options simply don't work that way. Most cloud infrastructure solutions are designed to support predictable back-office applications, and if you exceed your projected traffic, you pay accordingly. But if you build your own infrastructure, you're forced to over-provision machines in case of spikes in usage," said Christian Yang, co-founder of ReelSurfer. "Joyent is different from other cloud providers like Amazon Web Services -- they bring a new approach to cloud infrastructure. They saw the trend toward more user- and data-intensive apps like ours and they're providing the only high-performance infrastructure that can support them."

More information on ReelSurfer's use of Joyent is available here.

About ReelSurfer
ReelSurfer is a free online service that lets anyone clip and share any video from any website. Users enter the URL of a video and then use intuitive controls to select the best segment of up to 30 seconds. They can share the clip via websites, social media, or email -- or combine it with other clips to create a reel. For more information, visit http://reelsurfer.com.

Co-founded by Stanford University classmates Christian Yang and Neil Joglekar in 2008, ReelSurfer has become a valuable solution for companies to help increase their video views and drive highly-engaged potential customers to their websites. Backed by tech seed funder Y Combinator, the company's advisors include movie producer William Fay, Yahoo Senior Director Anand Chandrasekaran, Pacific Data Images founder Carl Rosendahl, and Morphlabs Vice President of Business Development Margo Drakos.

About Joyent
Joyent is the high-performance cloud infrastructure company, offering enterprises and developers the best public, private and hybrid cloud infrastructure for today's demanding applications. JoyentCloud.com delivers public cloud services to some of the most innovative companies in the world, including Digital Chocolate, LinkedIn, Voxer and ModCloth. Node.js, the open source server-side JavaScript project owned and stewarded by Joyent, provides developers and enterprises such as Microsoft with the most powerful runtime for developing data-intensive, real-time apps. Joyent is also the key contributor to and sponsor of Joyent SmartOS, an open source project dedicated to the complete, modern operating system. SmartDataCenter orchestrates Joyent's technologies into a cohesive, reliable and distributed system that can stand up to the compute demands of the modern world. A global ecosystem of leading technology partners assists Joyent in enabling customers to leverage the performance, scalability, reliability and security inherent in the company's cloud solutions. For more information, visit http://www.joyent.com.