Engine Yard, Inc.

Seeking Alpha Rates Engine Yard Stock as a Buy.

Opportunity

For the nation’s most savvy and inquisitive investors, Seeking Alpha is the premier financial opinion and analysis platform for actionable stock market information. Seeking Alpha’s editors handpick the best stock market opinion and analysis from blogs, traditional media, money managers, investment newsletters, and user-generated financial content to enable investors to make the most informed decisions. To date, more than 1000 contributors have been published on Seeking Alpha.

With more than 4 million unique users per month looking for financial opinion and analysis, Seeking Alpha requires maximum uptime and to scale as user traffic grows (the site just eclipsed more than 32 million monthly page views). When Koby Menachemi joined the company as CTO in 2006, he inherited the task of fulfilling this goal and keeping the website, which is built with Ruby on Rails, running smoothly.

Though the initial decision to build the Seeking Alpha website with Rails paid off with rapid development and faster time-to-market, Menachemi faced performance challenges and maintenance issues that required a larger team and time commitment then he had. Moreover, the company’s current Rails deployment partner was no longer able to help with the kind of scalability Seeking Alpha needed. Thus, they began the search for an alternative.

Solution

“You need to be a real professional to build a cluster like Seeking Alpha has. It means keeping it secure all the time and using different architectures to achieve company goals and maintain high levels of performance, stability and uptime,” said Menachemi. “There are lots of complexities with Rails maintenance that non-Rails experts simply can’t handle efficiently.”

Engine Yard caught Seeking Alpha’s eye because of their expertise in Rails, the configuration of their offerings and their 24/7 support and monitoring capabilities.

“We determined that Engine Yard offered the best solution for us. It would allow us to handle everything on only one server instead of multiple servers, which makes application development and deployment much easier,” Menachemi said.

Results

In February 2008 Seeking Alpha made the switch to Engine Yard. Within a few short months, Engine Yard was able to give Seeking Alpha greater efficiency and peace of mind than could be offered by an alternative deployment firm or by hiring additional help to bring the work in-house. Menachemi estimated that his development team would have needed to hire at least four full time employees to work long shifts every day to achieve the same level of stability, security, and reliability.

“Engine Yard’s understanding of Ruby on Rails architecture is outstanding. They have the troubleshooting experience from working with many customers that significantly shortened our time-to-value,” Menachemi said.

The sheer depth of the Rails expertise of the Engine Yard team yielded several direct benefits:

• Took over 24/7 monitoring and maintaining of Seeking Alpha
• Saved Seeking Alpha thousands of dollars over hiring an in-house team
• Extended their experience with Rails architecture to offer top product and redesign recommendations
• Enabled Seeking Alpha’s developers to spend less time firefighting server issues and more time focusing on core corporate goals and reader satisfaction
• Provided top-notch customer support, including quick handling of any consumer technical issues that arises

Menachemi recalls an early encounter with Engine Yard’s support. “When we switched to Engine Yard, they sent an engineer to help us on-site in Israel. He originally came for one week, but stayed for almost three weeks to ensure that everything would run perfectly. It’s that kind of exceptional service that we’ve come to expect from Engine Yard.”

He added, “I would strongly recommend Engine Yard to any Internet CTO. Their expertise, practical know-how and outstanding service have set them apart from other service providers, and we look forward to a long and productive relationship.”

www.seekingalpha.com

New York, New York and Israel

Industry:

Technology and Media

Location:

New York and Israel

Opportunity:

Successfully deploy a cost-effective Rails solution to maintain site performance as the user base increases.

Solution:

Partner with Engine Yard, whose Rails expertise and customer support give Seeking Alpha peace of mind about maintaining the site and handling all server side issues and challenges.

Results:

• 24/7 site monitoring, maintenance and problem solving, previously thought to have required four additional hires
• Ability to seamlessly handle upwards of 4 million unique users/month and more than 32 million page views/month
• A development team free from complicated Rails-related maintenance and tweaking, allowing them to focus on improving the site for the future