Validin provides companies with a better way to index and process large amounts of data in a scalable and cost-effective way by using a database that needs less computing power. Their proprietary technology, called Serj, has served over 3.5 trillion records with a 250 millisecond time to first response for queries. When Validin heard about DigitalOcean’s new Premium CPU-Optimized Droplets, they tried them out and quickly found that their workloads processed faster and they could save money by moving more of their computing to DigitalOcean. As they scale, they’ll continue to utilize DigitalOcean and value the simplicity of setting up their infrastructure, low bandwidth costs, and reliability of the platform.

Lower cost, better performance for a high-bandwidth company

Validin is a data indexing company that was started after the founders realized that startups in industries that require a large amount of data processing and indexing can quickly see their database costs balloon to over five figures a month. Because of the nature of their solution, Validin requires a huge amount of CPU power to process the data in their platform. They were running some workflows on Amazon Web Services with a high speed CPU, but the data processing wasn’t going as fast as they would like, and they experienced other issues like throttling.

Validin first discovered DigitalOcean through its community tutorials, which provided in-depth instructions on how to accomplish RAID array creation in a new version of Ubuntu. When they heard about DigitalOcean’s Premium CPU-Optimized Droplets, Validin found they had a lot of the features they were looking for, including faster CPUs, faster disk access, and high network speeds. They moved some of their resources to DigitalOcean, and found that with the Premium CPU-Optimized Droplets their workload processing was faster by several hours.

“When we heard about the Premium CPU-Optimized Droplets, the Premium CPU-Optimized Droplets had a lot of features they were interested in like faster CPUs, fatter pipe, faster disk access. When we tried Premium CPU-Optimized Droplets we moved a workflow that was in AWS EC2 using their z1d instance types, and with the Premium CPU-Optimized Droplets our workloads got faster by several hours.” - Kenneth Kinion, Managing Director, Validin

In addition to faster processing, another important factor to Validin as a small business was the bandwidth cost provided by DigitalOcean. Validin is a very bandwidth-driven company, and have found that even if they go over the generous bandwidth included with DigitalOcean, they are paying about a seventh of what they previously paid with AWS. They also love that Premium CPU-Optimized Droplets include a generous amount of fast NVMe storage out of the box.

“The fact that you have bandwidth bundled with virtual machines was a big deal for us. We have about 50TB in and out each month and are very bandwidth-driven as we need to collect data and process it and send it back out. Even if you go over the allotted bandwidth it’s still about 1/7th of what we would be paying with AWS—right off the bat we saved roughly $2000 a month.” - Kenneth Kinion, Managing Director, Validin

DigitalOcean provides hands-on attention for small businesses

When Validin moved to DigitalOcean, they found it refreshing that they were able to easily meet with the solutions engineering team. Validin got help from DigitalOcean’s experts who answered questions quickly and even scheduled a call to discuss their migration.

Validin has just five employees on their core technical team, so efficiency is extremely important to them. While reliability and bandwidth were some of the reasons Validin first moved to DigitalOcean, they have also found that DigitalOcean’s monitoring solutions are much simpler than those with AWS. They now spend a lot less time on monitoring and operations, and it’s been easier to automate virtual machines as DigitalOcean’s interfaces are easy to use and well-documented.

“We tried reaching out to AWS’ support for some issues with reliability and they said we didn’t pay enough even to just submit a ticket, which was very frustrating. It was refreshing when we went to DigitalOcean and someone proactively reached out to us. We were able to get our basic questions answered very quickly, and DigitalOcean’s resources have been very helpful.” - Kenneth Kinion, Managing Director, Validin

Validin is currently using a multi-cloud solution, but plan to use DigitalOcean as their default solution for new customers because of the powerful, yet cost-effective performance of the Premium CPU Optimized Droplets. Validin is growing their customer base, and looks forward to continuing to use DigitalOcean as they fulfill their mission of giving their own customers access to more cost-effective data processing.