AWS Case Study: HashCube

Based in Bangalore, India, HashCube was founded in 2009 by two long-time friends who decided to turn their obsession for games into a business. Presently employing five people, the young company is experiencing steady growth—they indicate they have recently passed the milestone of 150,000 monthly users. Although the games were initially developed for the Facebook platform, their popularity has encouraged the company to develop games for other platforms. As a result, many of HashCube’s games are currently available on Orkut, Myspace, and Hi5.

Initially, HashCube used several virtual private server (VPS) services for its computing. However, the VPS infrastructure failed to provide the reliability that is so crucial to a startup company. Serious uptime issues forced the company to look at alternative solutions. After exploring different options, the company turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) because “AWS is the most reliable, scalable, and affordable hosting service out there,” says Ramprasad Rajendran, cofounder of HashCube. Since incorporating Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) into its architecture, HashCube runs its Web Server and MySQL in a single instance. Amazon EC2 manages computing capacity for the Website’s traffic while Amazon S3 stores customer and user information.

HashCube’s reliability has improved dramatically since migrating to AWS. Ramprasad explains: “We serve more than 1.5 million users with a single server on Amazon EC2. Our server has been up for more than 450 days without any problem. We have had almost 100% uptime.” The reliability and security of the AWS infrastructure is quite different from the volatility of HashCube’s Website under the previous VPS configuration.

Growth is always a concern for startup companies, but Amazon EC2 puts those fears to rest by giving companies the ability to scale up and down based on their computing needs. By scaling up during peak times or scaling down during lulls, companies can effectively meet the demands of user traffic without affecting performance.

The “pay-as-you-go” pricing structure makes AWS an extremely affordable solution. Because users pay only for the computing capacity used, they can noticeably improve the bottom line—a very important feature for startups like HashCube as well as older, established companies.

To learn more, visit http://www.hashcube.com/ .

Added April 21, 2011