AWS Case Study: Litmus

Litmus is a testing tool. It lets designers and marketing professionals easily and affordably test their web site designs and email campaigns on multiple browsers and platforms before release. Litmus has been recognized for their innovative interface and has been applauded by customers for saving them time and money.

Initially, Litmus was hosted on a combination of in-house hardware and dedicated servers. The company grew quickly, and soon they outgrew their hardware. As a team who is dedicated to simplifying processes and saving money, they began hunting for better alternatives. Co-Founder, Paul Farnell tells us about the process, “We looked for solutions that would meet our needs of scalability and cost. We chose Amazon S3 because there was nothing else like it when we first started. For Amazon EC2 we initially trialed a competitor to Amazon, but found it to be tremendously unreliable. Comparatively, Amazon has been a dream. We especially liked the fact that there was no minimum spend and we could get started without going through a lengthy sales process – which wasn’t the case with one of the other providers we looked at.”

“Amazon Web Services have become a key part of our technology strategy. With their easy setup, economical costs, and helpful support staff, we’ve been able to migrate almost all of our infrastructure over to AWS. In the process we’ve managed to cut down the time we spent on server administration and scalability, in general.”

Today, Litmus uses Amazon S3 to store over 6TB of customers’ images and Amazon EC2 for running customers’ tests. Farnell shares the details, “When we first started out we stored the images on our own hardware, but as we grew we realized this was quickly going to become a headache. By using S3 we were able to focus on improving our product, not worrying about scaling up our storage. We also use Amazon EC2 to run the automated email tests for our customers; we currently have 400 EC2 servers. By using EC2 we’re able to add more servers to our grid during the busy periods of the day, and remove them during quieter periods. Before using EC2, Litmus used to run more slowly during our busiest periods, but with EC2’s flexibility we’re able to offer a consistently fast experience for our customers – and it costs us less. AWS has helped us to expand our service to a much larger number of users more quickly than we otherwise could have done.”

You can find Litmus at http://litmusapp.com This link will launch in a new browser window or tab. and learn more about the team behind it at http://www.salted.com .