Featured Site: bet-mate.com

Our fifth featured AppHarbor application is bet-mate.com. We have talked to Nikolas Tziolis, one of the three founders. Nikolas keeps the site running and supervises the bet-mate developers.

What is bet-mate.com?

Recently someone from Sequoia Capital put it in the simplest form I can imagine: bet-mate.com is the Bloomberg or Reuters for sports events.

We're currently focused on football (or soccer, if you will). bet-mate.com gives members an overview of the current betting market situation as well as detailed insights on specific events. The focus is to identify market trends and visualize these trends in a fashion that lets our members utilize them. The goal is not to predict results, but to highlight trends in the market.

Most of our customers are full-time strategic sports-bettors that use our data to improve their bottom line results.

How many users do you have?

We currently have ~10k unique visitors per day.

The average time-on-site is 30 minutes. bet-mate generates a lot of server-load because the site performs JSON-requests to refresh page data in the visitors browser every 30 seconds.The site is extremely data heavy and we perform a huge amount of caching to be able to serve as many visitors as we do.

Why did you choose AppHarbor?

Previously we self hosted bet-mate.com within multiple virtual containers. We were unhappy with the effort we had to put into keeping everything running smoothly, so we started looking at cloud-based hosting.

Since bet-mate is .NET-only, we tried to host the site on Windows Azure. We spent a lot of time trying to get Azure working but we were ultimately unable to port bet-mate to Azure for a number of reasons:

  • General complexity of the Azure platform
  • No DNS management
  • No load balancing
  • Some library incompatibilities
  • And last, but not least: pricing

We also looked into using Amazon as a cloud hosting platform, but the many options and the fact that we had to manage resources ourselves, made us discard this option too.

So how did we end up using AppHarbor? I think I first heard about AppHarbor via a tweet from one of the guys on the ASP.NET team at Microsoft. We tried it and it just worked!

We were able to setup the page in less than 30 minutes, with no previous AppHarbor experience. After the initial setup, we simply added the AppHarbor instance as an additional node in our cluster. Over a period of one month, the AppHarbor instance was the most reliable of all the instances in our cluster.

During this month, we encountered multiple small issues. The AppHarbor staff always solved our issues very quickly, even on weekends. This is extremely important for us since 80% of our business is on the weekend.

We were also impressed with how simple DNS management and database creation was.

For the above reasons we chose to switch to AppHarbor entirely.

Which technologies is bet-mate.com built on?

How has AppHarbor worked for you so far?

In short: It just works, and that's the hole point. In the past, it was quite an effort to ensure site availability, especially with a growing visitor/customer base. AppHarbor has taken away that pain.

How often do you deploy new versions?

A couple of times per week. The beauty is that if something doesn't work, we can roll back to a known working state within seconds. We use this feature frequently. Our customers constantly request new features and it's important for us to fulfill their requests as fast as possible.

Using AppHarbor we have cut the time, from first getting the request to deploying it, by half. We tend to deploy things right away and roll back if problems arise. Our customers are very happy with this strategy because it lets them influence the outcome of a new feature much earlier than before.

What did you like the best? Where could we improve?

The best part has got to be the smooth deployment experience. I've been working in IT for 15 years and I have never seen deployments as smooth as these. From not knowing a system to having deployed a fairly complex website on AppHarbor in 30 minutes is a record!

So what do I wish for?

  • detailed monitoring
  • background services
  • build in distributed caching
  • database backup availability via ftp or another protocol (for local archiving)
  • additional data centers (Europe/Asia)
  • SSH for authentication

Anything else?

Thank you AppHarbor, for saving us multiple times already after we have moved our site to AppHarbor. Some deployments simply crashed the page, and some went crazy on the database (always our fault) but we could always count on you having our backs.

And thank you Nikolas for taking the time to answer our questions and for hosting bet-mate.com on AppHarbor!

bet-mate Screenshot

Friday, 29 April 2011

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