www.backblaze.com Open in urlscan Pro
2606:4700::6811:603  Public Scan

Form analysis
0 forms found in the DOM

Text Content

___


Products
B2 Cloud Storage
Object storage for servers, media and more
OverviewCase Studies
Features
Cloud ReplicationUniversal Data Migration
IntegrationsPricingDocs
Computer Backup
Unlimited, automatic Mac and PC file backup
Overview
Personal
OverviewMacPCComparisonReviewsPricing
Business
OverviewSecurityCustomer StoriesPricing
PricingFeatures
B2 Cloud Storage
Object storage for servers, media and more
Computer Backup
Unlimited, automatic Mac and PC file backup
SolutionsSecurity
About Us
OverviewNewsroomBlogDrive StatsCareersInvestor Relations
PartnersSupportSign InAbout Us

Support

Sign In


B2 Cloud StorageCase Studies
Features
Cloud ReplicationUniversal Data Migration
IntegrationsPricingDocs
Contact Sales
Sign Up




Big Cartel


E-COMMERCE PLATFORM DESIGNS MULTI-CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE


1M
Websites Hosted
50%
Reduction in OpEx
<200ms
To Serve Files

The number one factor is that Backblaze just works, and it always works. By that
metric—the sole metric that matters to us besides cost—Backblaze has been great.

Lee Jensen, Technical Director, Big Cartel




SITUATION

Big Cartel’s infrastructure needs evolved as they grew to host one million
e-commerce sites. They initially used Amazon for storage and content delivery,
but as an organization serving independent artists, they felt conflicted about
patronizing a company known for its complicated relationship with independent
businesses. They resolved to reduce their dependence on Amazon and increase data
redundancy.


SOLUTION

First, Big Cartel decoupled their CDN from Amazon by switching to Fastly. After
learning about Backblaze’s S3 Compatible API and partnership with Fastly, they
added Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage for origin storage. Following successful
performance tests, they mirrored data to Backblaze B2 in less than a day, and
retained Amazon S3 for backup—creating a fully redundant, multi-cloud system.


RESULT

With reliable, performant origin storage from Backblaze B2, Big Cartel can focus
on enhancing their platform instead of worrying about vendor dependence. They
doubled data redundancy at a cost that allows them to expand their free tier and
eliminate application fees, and gained a trusted partner in support of their
mission to serve independent shop owners making a living doing what they love.


SHARE THIS CASE STUDY

Shares






Download this Case Study
Application StorageContent Distribution & DeliveryMulti-CloudUniversal Data
MigrationE-commerceSaaS PlatformsFastly

Big Cartel is an e-commerce platform that makes it easy for artists, musicians,
and independent business owners to build unique online stores. Since 2005,
they’ve helped people from all over the world sell their work online. Founded
“by artists, for artists,” they’re a small, tight-knit team focused on making
their software as a service platform empowering and easy to use. As independent
artists themselves, they value supporting causes that matter, sharing knowledge,
developing skills, and giving the Big Cartel team room to pursue creative
projects—many employees host their own storefronts on Big Cartel.

All images provided by Big Cartel.


THE ART OF MULTI-CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE

Friends always turned to Big Cartel Co-founders, Matt Wigham and Eric Turner,
when they were in need of a website for a new band. Both musicians themselves,
Wigham had the technical expertise and Turner had the design eye to create
frontman-approved sites. But one challenge always frustrated them—back in 2005,
setting up e-commerce to sell band merch online was complicated. They wanted to
make it easier and more accessible, so they created a software as a service
(SaaS) platform, then known as MerchBoss, to host simple online stores.

‍

They quickly discovered that many of their first customers weren’t the indie
bands and musicians they anticipated, but artists working across a wide variety
of media who wanted to sell their work. Independent artists don’t have teams of
people to manage a more sophisticated e-commerce platform like Shopify, and they
don’t want to compete in a marketplace with tens of thousands of other artists
like Etsy. They want simplicity in administration and control over their
product.

‍

After realizing there was potential to help out a broader audience than what
they first envisioned, Wigham and Turner repositioned the platform as Big
Cartel, opening it up to all kinds of independent artists, creators, crafters,
and makers. Unlike Shopify and Etsy, their solution provides an easy, affordable
way to launch an online shop where the artist owns their web property, traffic,
and reputation.

‍

Big Cartel now serves a community of independent shop owners who’ve sold more
than $2.5 billion of creative work through more than one million Big
Cartel-hosted sites. Their storage infrastructure needs naturally evolved as
they scaled to serve even more people and to make selling creative work online
even easier. Unconventional from the start, they’ve done things their own
way—from self-hosting their platform to seeking out vendors aligned with their
ethos. Maturing their storage infrastructure was no different.

‍

‍


LEARN THE RULES TO BREAK THE RULES: THE PATH TO SELF HOSTING

When Technical Director, Lee Jensen, started at Big Cartel in 2010, the company
was running the platform on the shared hosting service Rails Machine and storing
content on Amazon S3. Jensen had come from a company that specialized in Ruby on
Rails hosting, and saw an opportunity to sharpen Big Cartel’s edge in the
market.

‍

“I see a lot of value in the contrarian position of hosting your own equipment,”
he explained. Jensen started building out servers and systems to take the
platform fully self-hosted. The move has been a differentiator for Big Cartel,
allowing them to save costs, underspend versus their competition, and pass those
savings on to the independents using their platform.

‍

They’ve been self-hosted since 2013, with two notable exceptions—cloud storage
and content delivery. Because they store so many product images for customers’
e-commerce sites, they value the elasticity of cloud storage and the ability to
add space as needed without investing in infrastructure to support it. And
because they need to deliver those images fast, a cloud content delivery network
(CDN) reduces latency by caching images on geographically distributed nodes
closer to end users.

‍

Despite some misgivings, they continued to use Amazon S3 to store content and
implemented Amazon’s CloudFront CDN for content delivery. “As a company that
believes in funding and building independent business owners, we have a tenuous
relationship with the idea of giving money to Amazon,” Jensen noted. “We are
always looking to spend our dollars in places that are less ethically
compromising.”




As a company that believes in funding and building independent business owners,
we have a tenuous relationship with the idea of giving money to Amazon. We are
always looking to spend our dollars in places that are less ethically
compromising.

Lee Jensen, Technical Director, Big Cartel




THE VANISHING POINT (OF FAILURE): AMAZON S3

In an effort to build a more ethically sound infrastructure, Jensen switched
from CloudFront to Fastly in 2015. As an API-first, edge cloud platform designed
for programmability, the team felt Fastly gave Big Cartel more functionality and
control than CloudFront. With the Fastly Varnish Configuration Language (VCL), a
scripting language that allows users to make changes to Fastly’s services, Big
Cartel can detect patterns of abusive behavior, block content at the edge, and
optimize images for different browsers on the fly. “Fastly has really been a
force multiplier for us. They came into the space with published, open,
transparent pricing and the configurability of VCL won us over,” Jensen said.

‍

The decision to continue using Amazon S3 for storage never sat well with Jensen,
but the service met Big Cartel’s needs from a technical perspective until Amazon
S3 experienced some high profile outages in 2020. Big Cartel wasn’t affected,
but the disruptions gave them pause. “Having a single storage provider was a
single point of failure that we grew less and less comfortable with over time,”
Jensen acknowledged. He felt it was in their best interest to find an
alternative.

‍

‍


ASSEMBLAGE, OR HOW TO BUILD A MULTI-CLOUD SYSTEM

Jensen had used Backblaze Computer Backup personally and appreciated the
valuable, transparent content he’d found on Backblaze’s blog in the past. After
learning about the Backblaze S3 Compatible API as well as its partnership with
Fastly, including free egress, he recognized an opportunity to stand up an
alternative to Amazon S3 that fit Big Cartel’s ideals and ethos, as well as
their use case. He began taking steps to increase Big Cartel’s data redundancy.

‍

The Big Cartel application sends customer-uploaded content directly to cloud
storage via a pre-signed URL that they give to the client-side Javascript. To
make the method for signing URLs work across platforms, Jensen built a service
written in Go, an open-source programming language, that multiplexed uploads to
both Amazon S3 and Backblaze B2. So now, when a customer uploads content, it
gets stored in both storage clouds, then Fastly’s VCL preferentially delivers
that content from Backblaze B2. Mirroring incoming data allowed Big Cartel to
test out both origin stores and compare performance and reliability.

No items found.



CONCEPT SKETCHES: TESTING SPEED AND RELIABILITY

“We had no problems with the content served from Backblaze B2,” Jensen said of
the tests. “The time to serve files in our 99th percentile, including fully
rendering content, was under one second, and that’s our worst case scenario.”
The time to serve files in their 75th percentile was under just 200 to 300
milliseconds. Based on the performance, Jensen decided to mirror all of their
existing data to Backblaze B2, completing the data transfer in less than a day
using Backblaze’s Cloud to Cloud Migration service.

‍

Big Cartel continues to run the multiplexing tool and retains all
customer-uploaded content on both Amazon S3 and Backblaze B2 with the Fastly VCL
configured to serve from either location, if necessary. The multi-cloud system
provided the data redundancy they sought. “Even though we’re paying for storage
in both Amazon S3 and Backblaze B2, it has more than paid for itself in terms of
the peace of mind of having two storage providers with two different data
centers,” Jensen noted.



We had no problems with the content served from Backblaze B2. The time to serve
files in our 99th percentile, including fully rendering content, was under one
second, and that’s our worst case scenario.

Lee Jensen, Technical Director, Big Cartel




BIG CARTEL’S BIG PICTURE: A PORTRAIT OF PERFORMANCE

With Backblaze B2’s performance and reliability, Big Cartel doesn’t have to
worry about content storage. They can focus on enhancing their platform.
“Storage has to be bulletproof, and the combination of Fastly and Backblaze B2
has been rock solid,” Jensen said. “The number one factor is that Backblaze just
works, and it always works. By that metric—the sole metric that matters to us
besides cost—Backblaze has been great.”

‍

Moreover, as a result of the partnership between Backblaze and Fastly, including
free egress between the services, Big Cartel’s data storage and delivery costs
have gone down, even as they doubled their storage footprint. They’re now saving
50% in operating costs by adding Backblaze B2 for origin storage versus using
Amazon S3 alone. The savings means Big Cartel can continue to invest in their
community, including dropping application fees and enhancing their free plan—the
latter long a part of Big Cartel’s business model.

‍

“Allowing shop owners to prove out an idea on our free plan is a powerful
thing,” Jensen explained. “We see a lot of people who start on a free plan and
really make something of their business.” Now, they can provide more services
for free to customers, deepening their commitment to emerging artists.



Storage has to be bulletproof, and the combination of Fastly and Backblaze B2
has been rock solid.

Lee Jensen, Technical Director, Big Cartel




INDIE-PENDENT: BIG CARTEL PLANS FOR SUSTAINABLE GROWTH

The success of the project reinvigorated Jensen’s pursuit of additional cost
savings in Big Cartel’s infrastructure, including potentially dropping Amazon S3
altogether or searching for an alternate secondary provider to maintain data
redundancy. Jensen also plans to enhance Big Cartel’s paid platform offerings to
increase customer retention while continuing to grow sustainably and ethically.
“We don’t always make choices based on what’s purely the best technical choice
or even the lowest cost option,” Jensen concluded. “The kinds of companies we
support matter to us. Backblaze ticks all of those boxes.”

‍

With Backblaze B2 as a partner, the future for Big Cartel looks as pioneering
and community-minded as their evolution thus far—continuing to offer easy,
affordable solutions to creators trying to make a living doing what they love.



 * Fastly’s edge cloud platform enables users to create great digital
   experiences quickly, securely, and reliably by processing, serving, and
   securing customers’ applications as close to end users as possible. Fastly’s
   edge cloud platform takes advantage of the modern internet, and is designed
   both for programmability and to support agile software development.

 * 

 * 


RELATED CASE STUDIES


KANOPY

Blockbuster Success: Scaling a Streaming Platform With Reliability and
Redundancy




AMERICAN PUBLIC TELEVISION

Public TV Syndicator Uses Cloud to Distribute Programs




CAN STOCK PHOTO

Simplifies Storage and Processing for 70+ Million Files




ABOUT BACKBLAZE

The Backblaze B2 Storage Cloud is purpose-built for ease. It offers always-hot,
S3 compatible object storage that supports your workflows via third-party
software integrations, APIs, CLI, and web UI. And it’s priced for easy
affordability at rates a fraction of other cloud providers. Businesses in more
than 175 countries use the platform to host content, build and run applications,
manage media, back up and archive data, and protect and recover from ransomware.

Sign Up


Contact Sales
© 2023 Backblaze
A Publicly Traded Company
(
BLZE
)
Terms & PoliciesPrivacyContact













PRIVACY PREFERENCE CENTER

When you visit any website, it may store or retrieve information on your
browser, mostly in the form of cookies. This information might be about you,
your preferences or your device and is mostly used to make the site work as you
expect it to. The information does not usually directly identify you, but it can
give you a more personalized web experience. Because we respect your right to
privacy, you can choose not to allow some types of cookies. Click on the
different category headings to find out more and change our default settings.
However, blocking some types of cookies may impact your experience of the site
and the services we are able to offer. More information
Allow All


MANAGE CONSENT PREFERENCES

OPTIONAL COOKIES

Optional Cookies



 * TARGETING COOKIES
   
   Required Cookies
   
   These cookies may be set through our site by our advertising partners. They
   may be used by those companies to build a profile of your interests and show
   you relevant adverts on other sites. They do not store directly personal
   information, but are based on uniquely identifying your browser and internet
   device. If you do not allow these cookies, you will experience less targeted
   advertising.

Cookies Details‎

REQUIRED COOKIES

Required Cookies



 * PERFORMANCE COOKIES
   
   Required Cookies
   
   These cookies allow us to count visits and traffic sources so we can measure
   and improve the performance of our site. They help us to know which pages are
   the most and least popular and see how visitors move around the site. All
   information these cookies collect is aggregated and therefore anonymous. If
   you do not allow these cookies we will not know when you have visited our
   site, and will not be able to monitor its performance.

 * STRICTLY NECESSARY COOKIES
   
   Always Active
   
   These cookies are necessary for the website to function and cannot be
   switched off in our systems. They are usually only set in response to actions
   made by you which amount to a request for services, such as setting your
   privacy preferences, logging in or filling in forms. You can set your browser
   to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will
   not then work. These cookies do not store any personally identifiable
   information.

 * FUNCTIONAL COOKIES
   
   Required Cookies
   
   These cookies enable the website to provide enhanced functionality and
   personalisation. They may be set by us or by third party providers whose
   services we have added to our pages. If you do not allow these cookies then
   some or all of these services may not function properly.

Cookies Details‎
Confirm My Choices

Back Button

Back


PERFORMANCE COOKIES

Vendor Search Search Icon Filter Icon


Clear Filters

Information storage and access
Apply
Consent Leg.Interest

All Consent Allowed

Select All Vendors
Select All Vendors
Select All Hosts


 * 33ACROSS
   
   HOST DESCRIPTION
   
   VIEW COOKIES
   
   
   REPLACE-WITH-DYANMIC-HOST-ID
    * Name
      cookie name


 * 33ACROSS
   
   View Privacy Notice
   
   3 Purposes
   
   REPLACE-WITH-DYANMIC-VENDOR-ID
   Arrow
   
   Consent Purposes
   
   Location Based Ads
   
   Consent Allowed
   
   Legitimate Interest Purposes
   
   Personalize
   
   Require Opt-Out
   
   Special Purposes
   
   Location Based Ads
   
   Features
   
   Location Based Ads
   
   Special Features
   
   Location Based Ads

Confirm My Choices


By clicking “Accept All Cookies”, you agree to the storing of cookies on your
device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our
marketing efforts. View ourCookie Policy

Cookies Settings Accept All Cookies


×
We Value Your Privacy
Settings
NextRoll, Inc. ("NextRoll") and our advertising partners use cookies and similar
technologies on this site and use personal data (e.g., your IP address). If you
consent, the cookies, device identifiers, or other information can be stored or
accessed on your device for the purposes described below. You can click "Allow
All" or "Decline All" or click Settings above to customize your consent.
NextRoll and our advertising partners process personal data to: ● Store and/or
access information on a device; ● Create a personalized content profile; ●
Select personalised content; ● Personalized ads, ad measurement and audience
insights; ● Product development. For some of the purposes above, our advertising
partners: ● Use precise geolocation data. Some of our partners rely on their
legitimate business interests to process personal data. View our advertising
partners if you wish to provide or deny consent for specific partners, review
the purposes each partner believes they have a legitimate interest for, and
object to such processing.
If you select Decline All, you will still be able to view content on this site
and you will still receive advertising, but the advertising will not be tailored
for you. You may change your setting whenever you see the Manage consent
preferences on this site.
Decline All
Allow All
Manage consent preferences