Case Study: ReelSurfer achieves reliable, scalable performance for viral video traffic with Joyent

ReelSurfer - Customer Case Study

ReelSurfer is a free online service co‑founded in 2008 that lets users clip and share up to 30‑second segments from any web video and combine clips into reels. Because the app is highly data‑intensive and can go from a few views to viral scale overnight, the team needed a bulletproof, easily customizable infrastructure that could prevent outages, handle unpredictable spikes, and let them add memory, CPU and storage without costly over‑provisioning.

ReelSurfer moved its platform to Joyent Cloud (SmartOS) so it could customize servers, spin up resources on demand, and avoid downtime during traffic surges. Joyent handled early spikes, and today ReelSurfer is doubling traffic week‑over‑week, serving hundreds of thousands of hits per day, scaling capacity instantly, reducing costs by provisioning only what’s needed, and retaining the flexibility to innovate across its stack.

ReelSurfer

Christian Yang

Co-Founder