Startup Thrives After Breaking Free from Costly Hyperscaler

High-level bullet points:

• Stopped redesigning solutions based on hyperscaler requirements
• Deployed Terraform and Managed Kubernetes on the public cloud
• Replaced expensive billing with startup-friendly pricing, month-to-month flexibility, and free data egress

Mantis Ad Network was founded in 2014 to provide programmatic advertising to the cannabis industry. 

Executive Summary

At the time, almost all advertising platforms and social networks did not allow cannabis or ancillary products to be advertised. Mantis founder Paris Holley realized he would have to create the technology to enable this type of promotion himself, and this is how Mantis came to be. Today, the company is an end-to-end advertising network that has been highlighted in media outlets, including Entrepreneur Magazine, ADWEEK, HuffPost, and more.  

Challenges

Like many startups, Mantis created their infrastructure on one of the three hyperscaler platforms and started bootstrapping their solutions. The company used those platforms for about eight years. They continued to add products and services to their infrastructure so they did not have to build or manage additional cloud services in-house; however, each year, Mantis found themselves having to rearchitect their infrastructure and rebuild technology based on the latest services that the hyperscalers provided. 

 As the company began to grow, constantly rearchitecting its solutions became too costly. Mantis had to spend more time and money rearchitecting than focusing on the business itself. It was rapidly growing and needed to start looking at scaling solutions to meet customer needs and traffic influx, and could not waste time rearchitecting. To cut costs, Mantis began to look at third-party vendors to use; however, moving data was still eating up a large part of their cloud cost. With all the solutions Mantis needed, hyperscaler platforms were simply too expensive, and they were not receiving the help they needed to adjust their infrastructure. This is when Mantis started looking at alternative cloud providers and found OVHcloud US®. 

Solutions Delivered

Mantis moved over to OVHcloud US and quickly joined the Startup Program. A hyperscaler had locked Mantis into a long-term agreement, and without the OVHcloud US Startup Program and credits, Mantis would not have been able to make the switch from the hyperscaler and still afford to run their business. 

“We had bought compute capacity for three years based on the inefficient systems that we had been running at the hyperscaler,” said Mantis Founder Paris Holley. “We realized we needed to leave the hyperscaler when we were paying legacy costs that we couldn’t get out of instead of being able to reinvest that money into our business. The cloud credits and support at OVHcloud US were huge because we were able to move our compute over and had enough credits to help us offset the payments that we were still making to the hyperscaler. At OVHcloud US, we can have month-to-month flexibility to constantly change our systems without having to worry about whether we are over-committing. This flexibility let us move everything from the hyperscaler, and we did not have to worry about costs while optimizing the infrastructure.”

Once Mantis was up and running at OVHcloud US, they had an immediate need for computing with strong bandwidth. Having bandwidth included with compute pricing was a major benefit to Mantis. “We were having to handle hundreds of thousands of requests a second,” said Holley. “I literally had vendors that we had launched the year prior who were sending us so much traffic that we had to delay rolling that capability out because it would have been too costly for us to run on the hyperscaler’s platform.” 

Results, ROI, and Future Plans

“By simply bringing OVHcloud US into the picture, we were able to bring on a vendor and open up a new sales opportunity for our team, a new feature, and a new capability set that we didn’t have because now we could tell vendors to send us as much traffic as they wanted,” said Holley. “Even better, this did not cost us anything extra, and OVHcloud US was able to meet our latency needs across both the East and West Coasts. Other providers that we had looked at performed well in one region or the other, but not both.”

“At the hyperscaler, they charged for moving data between their data centers in the U.S. So, if we wanted to have backups or redundancy, we had to pay to send data to ourselves on a private network. Not many cloud providers have a multi-region private network and do not charge to send data back and forth. This was another key feature of OVHcloud US that was an immediate help for our business,” said Holley. 
Once Mantis was settled at OVHcloud US and made the full transition from the hyperscaler, they were able to focus on their cloud infrastructure. At the time, Mantis had everything on bare metal due to the unrestricted bandwidth, whereas Public Cloud was not as consistent. However, Mantis was ready to explore the OVHcloud US Public Cloud services in more depth. 

“We did some testing with the public cloud and found that the performance difference between the two wasn’t significant enough to make sense to stay on bare metal. There were a few big reasons for us choosing Public Cloud,” said Holley. “First, OVHcloud is one of the few alternative cloud providers that supports Terraform, which is infrastructure as a code. I can easily light up servers using automated scripts and build templates around all of our architecture. Second, OVHcloud US has a managed Kubernetes service, which was huge because we were used to deploying on the hyperscaler’s proprietary container platform and wanted to move to something more open. We no longer needed to manually configure our bare metal because we could use the OVHcloud US Public Cloud. Third, OVHcloud Public Cloud has managed services like load balancers that were capable of handling all of the load we needed without fault. We were excited to have all of this in our arsenal because at hyperscalers, all of this would add up and be very expensive.” 
The OVHcloud US Startup Program allowed Mantis to focus on what they could build without having to choose between saving money and building for the future. Since Mantis joined OVHcloud US, they have been able to onboard new vendors and new partnerships because they have the flexibility to pivot as needed for their business. 

“I’m on the board of a few startups, and because of our incredible experience, OVHcloud is a partner for everything that I do now and will be in the future. Hyperscalers really do a great job luring in startups, saying they have all the top-tier best stuff, and they throw in startup credits. However, once you become a paying customer, they really have no incentive to help a bootstrapping company or a smaller startup. 
OVHcloud US is who I recommend, and we are excited to continue growing with the company,” said Holley.