AWS Case Study: Altexa

In today’s digital era, keeping precious data stored on personal computers is a daily practice for most computer users. But how many of these users take the time to backup precious files like family photos, videos of their kids, important tax records, and critical school or work documents? The answer is: too few. Most people do not consider backing up their data until an unfortunate event like a hard drive crash, a stolen laptop, or other disaster forces them to think about it. More cautious people may use DVDs to back-up their data, but the backup process is neither automated nor consistent.

With the goal of alleviating this pain point, and making data backup an easy task for consumers and small businesses, Altexa developed Altexa Backup—a simple and powerful solution for offsite backup. To appeal to the broadest audience, Altexa knew its solution had to be reliable and competitively priced. To achieve this, the company turned to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). By utilizing Amazon S3, Altexa could offer customers the comfort of knowing their files were protected by Amazon, a company they knew and trusted. And with Amazon S3, Altexa could charge their customers far less for their backup storage.

Amazon S3 provides a simple Web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. Users pay only for what they consume—$0.15 per gigabyte of storage per month and $0.17 per gigabyte of data transferred—and there is no minimum fee.

“As soon as we heard about Amazon S3 we were intrigued with its possibilities for Altexa,” says Mark Walker, Altexa CEO. “When we learned of the pricing model, and saw for ourselves its ease of use and scalability, we knew it was the best choice for Altexa. Amazon S3 has taken away the burden of backup storage, and freed our development team to concentrate its efforts on our product offering.”

Prior to implementing Amazon S3, Altexa was using a solution developed in-house, which was rapidly becoming unwieldy. Amazon S3 was critical in making Altexa Backup more attractive to customers.

“No company offers data storage at a price as low as Amazon,” says Walker. “We had considered a hosting package with our ISP, but the price just wasn’t competitive.”

With Amazon S3, Altexa can offer its customers Web hosting-like benefits with a pricing model that is significantly lower than the competition. Altexa’s customers pay as little as $1 per month for a 1 GB space allowance. Comparable backup services charge upwards of $15 dollars per month for the same amount of storage.

The ability for a storage solution to scale over time was another critical need for Altexa Backup. With Amazon S3, Altexa is confident the speed and performance of its storage solution will remain top notch regardless of the storage load. “Since Amazon S3 is based on the same network and IT infrastructure that powers Amazon.com, we knew that our storage system would be robust and always available for our customers,” explains Walker. “There is no comparable service to Amazon S3 in terms of features and scalability.”

Amazon S3 was developed to be easy to work with, and Altexa’s integration experience is a testament to the storage solution’s superior design. It took the company just two working days to convert Altexa Backup over to Amazon S3. “It was so simple to implement Amazon S3 in Altexa Backup, Amazon should have called it Superior Storage System,” Walker adds.

For more on Altexa, go to http://www.altexa.com This link will launch in a new browser window or tab.