AWS Case Study: Site24x7

Hi Gibu, briefly tell us about your business.
Site24x7 is a website and web application monitoring service that helps webmasters and application teams running Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) using public clouds or traditional data centers ensure high performance and uptime for their business services.

Site24x7 has over 32 monitoring locations worldwide, helping customers from around the world use our services to ensure their websites are up from locations where their customers are actually located. Typical customers of Site24x7 are e-commerce websites, educational institutions, and other small office/home office (SOHO) users. There is also an iPhone client that facilitates easy access to www.site24x7.com.

Site24x7 was created by Zoho Corp., a company founded in 1996 with offices in North America, Europe, and Asia. Site24x7 also leverages over eight years of experience in the IT Management space with their ManageEngine business unit.

How have you incorporated Amazon Web Services as part of your architecture? What services are you using and how?
Amazon Web Services (AWS) plays an important role in how we are able to deliver our services.  Site24x7 provides monitoring nodes in over 30 locations worldwide.

The most attractive aspect for us is the number of regions from which we get servers from a single vendor. This helps us provide a wide variety of locations from which we can offer services to our customers.

Why did you decide to use AWS?
Prior to using AWS, we were using a lot of dedicated servers from many different vendors to host our applications. Thanks to the technology leadership, ease of doing business, and multiple availability zones offered by AWS we are making the switch to cloud computing.  Currently, we are moving as much of our workload as possible to AWS. 

How has AWS helped your business?
Site24x7 is used by thousands of customers worldwide.  We leverage AWS to help us deliver highly available website monitoring services for our customers.  AWS is easy to setup and use; hence we are able to setup our services in countries like Singapore, US, and Ireland quite easily. We are looking forward to seeing AWS add new regions.  

The ease of use of the AWS console and the flexibility to provision applications makes it easy when we need to take corrective actions.

Additionally, we consciously move the maximum possible workloads to the AWS system to rely on more hardware on-demand. This, along with our stateless architecture, helps us scale our business.

Can you share any metrics on your usage of AWS to date?
Most importantly, the mean time to recovery (MTTR) has gone down significantly since migrating to AWS.  Ensuring 100% uptime is very difficult, but the flexibility to build a resilient system with Amazon helps tremendously.

Do you have any future plans to incorporate other AWS solutions?
We are planning to provide value added services to our customers, which involves a lot of varying workloads. We feel a business case arises only because of the presence of cloud services like Amazon.

To learn more, visit http://www.site24x7.com/ .

Added December 21, 2011