Pippa partners with DigitalOcean and Cloudflare to lower costs and accelerate growth

Pippa provides simple and smart solutions for podcasting, including hosting, analytics, and ads. In April 2019, Acast acquired Pippa to expand their suite of tools for podcast creators and brands.

Acast is a future-thinking podcast company focused on providing compelling products and features for podcast creators. With their new, combined offering, it's even more important to ensure that Pippa has a scalable and robust infrastructure in place.

Challenges

The most critical part of Pippa’s business is rapid and reliable asset delivery. While Pippa’s small team is based in New York, it has podcasters signing up all over the world — and these creators care just as much about their listeners in Jakarta or Djibouti as the Bay Area and NYC.

Pippa wanted to provide its customers with a fast and secure platform that ensures podcast listeners can immediately enjoy their favorite shows, from anywhere. As such, they needed a globally distributed network that would put their content as close as possible to their listeners.

Furthermore, as Pippa grew, they were pushing millions of large audio files to listeners worldwide. This resulted in significantly increased costs, including excessive data egress fees for retrieving data from a cloud storage service such as AWS S3.

The Cloudflare Bandwidth Alliance has given them what they need to need to serve a huge volume of podcasts to users around the world — while keeping their costs in check.

“To deliver a global podcast service at the scale and speed listeners demand, the data transfer costs can become significant. The Bandwidth Alliance solves this both at a technical and financial level.”

— Simon Marcus prior CEO of Pippa, current Director of Product at Acast

The Bandwidth Alliance Solution

Pippa chose Cloudflare for its global network, which spans over 330 cities in 90 countries worldwide. Cloudflare improves Pippa’s performance by closing the distance between its podcast customers and their listeners — while simultaneously reducing costs via the Bandwidth Alliance. Meanwhile, Pippa benefits from Cloudflare's robust security services, which defend it against large-scale DDoS attacks.

As a Techstars startup, Pippa had been introduced to Techstars alumni DigitalOcean through DigitalOcean’s Hatch program, which helps developers create, launch, and scale their startups. The Pippa team decided to host their content using Spaces, DigitalOcean’s offering of S3 compliant object storage at a lower price than Amazon S3.

As a member of the Bandwidth Alliance, DigitalOcean waives egress fees to transfer data to Cloudflare, effectively creating a zero-cost data bridge from DigitalOcean to Cloudflare’s global network. With the combination of lower cost storage and zero egress fees, Pippa is currently seeing 50% savings on their cloud bill.

“At DigitalOcean, our goal is to bring app development within technical and economic reach for developers around the world. By working with Cloudflare to pass along the benefits of our interconnected networks, we can better serve our mutual customers. We are proud to serve Pippa’s storage needs with our high-quality global storage offering, Spaces, which enables them to more easily scale and grow their business,”

— Jeff Giannetti Chief Customer Officer at DigitalOcean

“From our perspective, the Bandwidth Alliance has been a significant technical win for Cloudflare and DigitalOcean, and a great business win for us at Pippa,” said Simon.

About the Bandwidth Alliance:

Data transfer fees charged by many cloud providers can be an integral part of your cloud hosting bill. Since cloud providers use their own global telecommunication backbone or transit service providers to carry traffic, they incur infrastructure costs, which they pass on to their customers as data transfer fees.

Most cloud providers that deliver traffic to users via Cloudflare share a presence with Cloudflare in the same data centers around the world. In these data centers, traffic is transferred locally through a peering connection, minimizing infrastructure costs and transit charges.

Our Bandwidth Alliance partners have agreed to pass on these cost savings to our joint customers by waiving or reducing data transfer charges.