SingleFeed Blog

This summer, SingleFeed’s engineering department migrated our systems from a dedicated hosting provider. Our web application and back-end feed processing is now done on virtual servers running on Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing platform, where we’ve joined companies such as the Washington Post, Harvard Medical School, Virgin Atlantic, and Autodesk in taking advantage of the expandability and flexibility of cloud computing.

What does this mean for our merchants? Most importantly, the ability to instantly add new resources to our system enables us to grow as needed to continue offering prompt feed processing and engine delivery. In fact, since moving to EC2 we’ve already transparently upgraded several of our servers, and in each case it took only a few minutes. Back when we were running on dedicated hardware, that process would have begun by requesting a new server, followed by days to get it installed and configured before we were even able to begin using it.

We’re also able to set up server instances for testing on demand, allowing us to explore new ways of providing better service for our customers. It’s marvelous to be able to create an exact clone of our system whenever we want to try out a new approach, and then just let the instances vanish when we’re done.

As we continue to grow, we’ll take further advantage of this flexibility to provide greater power for parsing, analyzing, and delivering our customers’ data feeds.