Howcast

Case Study

The Opportunity

Founded by veterans of Google and YouTube, Howcast.com blends professionally produced and user-generated content to show consumers engaging, useful how-to videos and wiki guides. Since launching publicly in February 2008, Howcast.com has grown its collection to more than 10,000 videos and averages over a million video views per month.

Initially, Howcast made the decision to implement its website in Java. With launch deadlines looming, however, the team became frustrated with the slow development progress. A few staffers had previously dabbled with Ruby on Rails, and the team, attracted to the framework’s reputation for facilitating rapid development, began to explore Rails. They were not disappointed. “Compared with other languages and frameworks, Rails made it easier to get more done—to be much faster with a smaller team, while keeping quality high,” says Russell Taga, Howcast’s Director of Engineering.

Howcast made the switch to Rails, but it still needed to put the infrastructure in place to deploy the application. Considering the time and money it would take to hire a full-time internal team to build the infrastructure in-house, the company began to look for alternatives.

The Solution

Engine Yard, as specialists in Ruby on Rails deployment services, immediately appealed to Howcast. With Engine Yard, Howcast avoided the pain of both figuring out which data center to use and of procuring and setting up the hardware and networking. The advantages presented by Engine Yard’s expert staff, standard hardware, and use of virtualization were clear.

In November 2007, Howcast kicked off its staging process on three Engine Yard slices. As it prepared to launch its public-facing site in January 2008, Howcast moved to its own private Engine Yard cluster. Seven months later, Howcast utilizes nearly 50 slices—all on the same original infrastructure.

“Engine Yard’s strong level of service allows us to quickly and efficiently set up and make changes to our infrastructure—which helps us get product updates out the door faster,” Taga says.

Results

Since launching Howcast.com, Howcast has continued to leverage Engine Yard infrastructure, whether rolling out a Facebook application and Google Gadget or building critical internal applications for reporting, to show consumers how-to videos wherever and whenever they need to learn how. In addition, Howcast currently runs multiple environments on Engine Yard, including staging, QA, and production.

Taga underscores his appreciation of Engine Yard’s expertise in Ruby on Rails. “Engine Yard has been able to work with us to scale the site without problems,” he says. “They offer a wide array of resources, from ”Database Administrators">DBAs to sys-admins to people with networking expertise."

“I highly recommend working with Rails,” Taga adds. “The Ruby on Rails community is an active, exciting, and passionate group and they’re making a lot happen. So many people are doing so many useful things with the intention of trying to help others.”

Taga has some advice for those considering Ruby on Rails. “If you’re planning on building a site from scratch and scaling, Engine Yard is an excellent choice. You can get the infrastructure set up much faster in a more cost-effective manner and won’t need a full-time staff on board to do it,” he says.

Ultimately, Taga knows consumer feedback is the true barometer of success or failure. “We’re constantly working on improving site performance and usability. We’ve actually gotten a few comments from users saying the site performance is snappy. Engine Yard played a big role is helping us achieve that.”