Search for better hosting yields “huge cost savings” by using AWS and AWS Marketplace

Managed hosting—at first it can feel like a good fit. Then it starts to feel like a straitjacket. That was the experience of MovieStarPlanet, a Danish company founded in 2009 to develop and market interactive social games aimed at children and tweens. The company’s catalog includes the games MovieStarPlanet, BooniePlanet, and BlockStarPlanet.

“We were using Adobe Media Server, Tableau Server, and OpenVPN in a hosted environment,” says Caspar Strandbygaard, the chief technology officer for MovieStarPlanet. “There were several incidents when the provider was down for hours, which cost us a huge amount of money, and the provider wouldn’t let us access and fix our servers ourselves.”

The young, entrepreneurial company started looking for a different managed hosting provider, only to find what Strandbygaard describes as a better overall option through Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace.

“While searching for alternative hosting, we stumbled onto the AWS Marketplace,” says Strandbygaard. “We found we could deploy Adobe Media Server, Tableau Server, and OpenVPN in just a few clicks, so we decided to try this approach.”

The new solution worked well. By deploying its mission-critical, line-of-business applications on AWS, MovieStarPlanet not only immediately solved the availability problem that had inspired its search, it also saved money in the bargain. “We were looking for better-quality hosting but we ended up with huge cost savings,” says Strandbygaard, explaining that Auto Scaling helps MovieStarPlanet avoid the cost of provisioning against spiky traffic and AWS Marketplace offerings help the company save “at least 25 percent on software procurements.”

Why stop there? After this initial positive experience with AWS Marketplace, MovieStarPlanet decided to expand its use of AWS. “We started shifting development workloads, staging workloads, and DevOps tools onto AWS,” says Strandbygaard. “Today, we actually have all our infrastructure hosted on AWS.”

Operating on AWS is helping MovieStarPlanet stay true to its roots as a creative, agile company. “It’s important to MovieStarPlanet not to be burdened by outdated traditions and processes,” says Strandbygaard. “One of the biggest benefits of using AWS Marketplace and AWS services is having access to preconfigured, easy-to-install software packages, which make it incredibly easy to test new technology without having to first learn about the nuts and bolts. AWS and AWS Marketplace really help our team to push boundaries and grow our products and company.”

To find out more, check out the case study video.