TicketLeap Case Study

TicketLeap is a lightweight online ticketing platform used by thousands of event organizers across the US and Canada. Through one unified system, organizers can sell tickets, track sales in real time and get people talking via social media about events before they happen. The company works with events in a wide range of industries, including haunted houses, community theaters, nightlife parties, and student activities events. The company employs 25 people in its Philadelphia, PA headquarters to handle sales and client support, technology development, marketing and accounting.

When TicketLeap decided to create a totally new ticketing platform, numerous problems arose with its hosting company. As a result of the severity and frequency of the problems, TicketLeap researched other options and found that the answer lay in cloud computing.

The array of Amazon Web Services (AWS) products offers TicketLeap a potent solution. The company uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Auto Scaling, and cloud monitoring services as the foundation for its platform. The TicketLeap website is written in the Python language using the Django Web framework, and TicketLeap uses the Boto project to interface with AWS. Because AWS provides a flexible, scalable, cost-effective, and reliable environment for the online ticketing system, TicketLeap’s offering is now entirely on AWS.

For startup companies, it is critical to deploy and scale hosting environments rapidly, which is a key component of the AWS solution. Keith Fitzgerald, Director of Engineering for TicketLeap, believes that “the flexibility and speed at which we could reconfigure our setups directly attributed to how quickly we were able to redevelop and launch our product.”

The company has experienced measurable results from the AWS solution—both in reduced costs and in increased revenue. “We’ve cut our hosting budget in half and increased the speed at which we iterate by an order of magnitude," Fitzgerald says. "The time savings for our development to release cycle cannot be understated. That’s the real value to us: how quickly we can get new products and features to market."

AWS is working so well that TicketLeap anticipates taking advantage of the enhancements that AWS continually makes to its products as well as new products as they become available.

"As a start up, time is precious," Fitzgerald says. "Switching to AWS dramatically increased productivity and allowed us to be better positioned to succeed in our market.”