Case Study: Envato Reduces Server Costs by 60% and Accelerates Development with New Relic

Innovator Envato Improves Development Process with New Relic

Envato is a self‑funded Melbourne startup (founded 2006) that operates nine digital marketplaces (including ThemeForest) and the Tuts+ education network, together serving about 30 million dynamic requests per week and over 18 million pageviews per month. With a distributed Ruby on Rails and PHP stack on Rackspace, rapid growth exposed performance and legacy‑code problems, limited real‑time visibility, and the need to scale without proportionally adding hardware or staff.

At EngineYard’s recommendation Envato deployed New Relic, which was quick to install and provided real‑time application monitoring and transaction traces across Rails and PHP. The team used those insights to find SQL and legacy‑code bottlenecks, enable continuous deployment, and reduce servers (estimated ≥60% savings), speed developer troubleshooting (saving months of work), and shift culture so developers own live performance—allowing growth with slower hiring and lower costs.

Envato

Collis Ta’eed

Founder and CEO