Loadbalancer.org helps mymovies deliver a secure, reliable video content service to worldwide media organizations

Many of the world's leading media and entertainment businesses rely on mymovies to produce and deliver high-quality video content to enhance their film, TV and broadcast products and services. For over five years, mymovies has been using the same, unchanged, fault-free and low-cost load balancing products from Loadbalancer.org to ensure video content is delivered to its customers when and where they need it.

Challenges

• Moving from a shared to a dedicated hosting center
• Many load balancing solutions over specified and too expensive
• Ensure video content is delivered reliably to 25 million people every month

Solution

• Enterprise MAX High Availability Clustered Pair

Benefits

• Helps ensure customers get the products and services the need when they need them
• Delivers an extremely reliable and effortless load balancing solution
• Load balancer appliances performed for five years and virtually no problems and no updates
• Equipment significantly cheaper than competitive products

"Loadbalancer.org offered us some free support in exchange for helping out with some sales and marketing activity. We declined because we've never actually needed any support. Not once in the five years that we've had the appliances have we ever had to call Loadbalancer.org. But we were more than happy to provide the marketing support because we believe in Loadbalancer.org products." - Paul Richards Director of Operations at mymovies.

Challenges faced by mymovies

Launched in 1998, mymovies produces and provides short-form movie content for some of the biggest media brands in the UK, including the likes of Virgin Media, EE and Vue Cinemas.

As such, hosting and distribution content is central to the company's operation. To do that, mymovies had been sharing data hosting facilities with another organization. But with increasing demand and a desire to take complete ownership of all its resources, the business decided to set up its own dedicated hosting capability. Previously, mymovies had shared load balancing functions with its former hosting partner, but now needed to find its own load balancing solution.

Paul Richards, Director of Operations at mymovies says "We went out and did the necessary research and found a range of different products, but many were around the $60,000 mark with a range of features that we were simply never going to use. However, the solution from Loadbalancer.org was exactly what we needed. There weren't a lot of frills, it had all the features we wanted in an efficient and effective load balancing solution, at a very competitive price."

Loadbalancer.org Solution

mymovies has deployed Loadbalancer.org's Enterprise MAX high-availability clustered pair appliance to load balance communication and video content data across its servers.

The Loadbalancer.org solution handles millions of requests a month from customers at a rate of around 150mbps. All web requests are handled by the load balancers and then forward to the relevant web servers in mymovies' data center based on mymovies' customizable scheduling. If any web server fails a health check, the load balancers take the server out of the cluster immediately, so that customers get the content they need without any interruption to the service they get from mymovies.

The results

One of the most important benefits of the Loadbalancer.org solution is its stability. mymovies provides a broad range of video content that its customers rely on to embellish and enhance their own products and services. Richards says, “For us, stability is the key. The Loadbalancer.org appliances offer premium stability and they are really rock solid. We are a service business, so if my network fails, then a lot of brands on the Internet would cease to provide video for their consumers. This technology is a key part of our ability to deliver - and constantly deliver - a service to our customers and that is critical to the business.”

The Enterprise high-availability clustered pair appliances have been in place for five years, during which time mymovies has experienced few, if any, problems with the equipment.

As Richards says, “In the five years since we deployed the Loadbalancer.org appliances, I think I have rebooted them a handful of times. I have to say, I am over moon with these appliances, they are effortless for me. I don’t have to think about them. The day that one of the load balancers does suffer a hardware failure – which after five years I am quite happy to receive – it will be swapped out with some more appliances from Loadbalancer.org.”

mymovies has also been impressed by the value for money that Loadbalancer.org offers, which Richards describes as “super competitive”. When mymovies first looked into buying a load balancing solution some five years ago, the company found that there were a number of other hardware appliance vendors whose products were tens of thousands of dollars more expensive than Loadbalancer.org.

Why not download our FREE 30-day trial and discover just how simple it is to start load balancing your applications. Feel free to contact us with any questions you may have as our trial even includes free and unlimited 24/7 support - what more could you want?