AWS Case Study: Abaca
In April 2006, a few Silicon Valley veterans set out to launch the only spam blocker in the industry with a 99% spam blocking, money-back guarantee. And no Venture Capital funding. The team set out with the intent to offer a superior spam filter at a low price while operating a nimble and cost-effective company. A few months later Abaca surpassed their estimated growth rate into a budding business.
Originally, Abaca had their servers in a colocation in which they personally managed the purchasing, configuring and ongoing maintenance of their hardware, software and operating systems. Like other web-based service providers, Abaca’s data center requirements were in flux and increased with their growing volume of customers. With a quarterly growth rate of 50%, Abaca found provisioning and de-provisioning servers time consuming and costly. They had a need, nay demand, for new servers in minutes, not days, and Abaca started researching other options.
To meet requests for their highly-efficient spam filter, Abaca switched to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for computing power. Choosing Amazon Web Services quickly proved to be a beneficial decision as it took less than 24 hours to set-up their customized Amazon Machine Image (AMI) and begin hosting their site and service on Amazon’s servers.
According to Marten Nelson, Co-founder of Abaca, “EC2 has enabled us to scale our business in a very cost-effective and timely manner. We provision new systems within a few minutes and the reliability and transparency of the Amazon infrastructure allows us to concentrate on what we know best—fighting spam.”
Amazon EC2 provides compute capacity in the cloud and allows companies to utilize Amazon’s infrastructure and pay based on consumed instance hours and bandwidth per month. This is an attractive alternative to the other server hosting options such as co-located hosting, managed hosting or dedicated hosting. These other small business options usually require expensive monthly contracts and lengthy turnarounds to set up new boxes. Some co-location facilities also have minimum requirements, requiring a full cabinet or rack, up to 42U.
Amazon EC2 proved to be the most cost-effective, responsive and flexible solution for Abaca. One major benefit to using Amazon EC2 over a co-location center was the ability to scale. In a co-location center, traffic and bandwidth need to be anticipated in advance and servers needed to be provisioned to cover the highest peak in traffic. When a surge of unanticipated traffic hits, it is difficult to realign resources and provision servers in time to meet demand. And in many cases, servers sit idle during low traffic periods. Using Amazon EC2, Abaca is able to switch servers off and on as necessary, paying only for the resources they use.
“Our data center requirements increase with the number of users we add as customers. EC2 allows us to easily scale,” says Nelson. Since switching to Amazon EC2, Abaca estimates they have saved several thousand dollars in cash-flow which is critical to any start-up.
With an easy-to-use interface, Abaca spam filter is a great solution for small/medium size businesses, small ISPs, and resellers. Abaca’s spam filter, Email Protection Gateway (EPG), offers high filtration rates, low management requirements and a low price point. The fool-proof filter includes an array of features such as anti-spam, anti-virus, DoS prevention, anti-phishing, DHA protection, and anti-spoofing. Abaca is quickly proving to be one of the best spam filters on the market and is consumed by organizations across a variety of industries from high tech to education.
For more on Abaca, go to http://www.abaca.com/
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