← All Articles

How EatAbout the “Airbnb of restaurants” survived press coverage from the Daily Mail Online

Kasia HoffmanKasia Hoffman
Dec 14th 15Updated Jul 26th 17
Customer Study

As a startup company, we know how important and difficult it is to make the most out of the few resources available, and automation seems to be the best friend for the job! I have spoken with EatAbout, the early stage startup, to get an insight into how using Cloud 66 helps them to build a successful business.

EatAbout Background

EatAbout is a new and exciting way to enjoy a meal with your friends, in the home of a chef. Similar to AirBnB, you can rate the whole experience afterwards. If you’re a fan of the TV program Masterchef, you can use EatAbout to book a meal with the finalist Emma Spitzer, this years finalist!

EatAbout launched just 3 weeks ago in London, by our own Philip Kallberg (former Customer Success Manager at Cloud 66) and his co-founder Felix Braberg. EatAbout has already hit the headlines, DailyMail and Prima, being hailed as the “Airbnb of restaurants”. Congratulations!

how-eatabout-the-airbnb-of-restaurants-survived-press-coverage-from-the-daily-mail-online

I have spoken with Philip about EatAbout and their infrastructure set up.

Can you give us an overview of your infrastructure set up?

We're running our staging and production stacks on Cloud 66, the former with DigitalOcean and the latter with Rackspace. The production stack runs on a 3.75GB compute server (app) and 1GB standard (database) so it's a pretty simple setup. All our assets and user uploads are served from S3, and we use NewRelic to keep an eye on the application and server performance.

What are the benefits of using Cloud 66 for your engineering team?

Using Cloud 66 is a no-brainer for us - it let’s us focus on what we do best. As a small team, every minute of the day counts, so automating our server setup and upkeep is essential. Deploying from a Git push is really helpful, and knowing that our background processes and database backups are looked after helps us sleep at night. On top of this, we also know we can scale everything at a moment's notice when the time comes.

What Cloud 66 features are you using?

The main features I mentioned earlier, and we're also using your SSL add-in and Live Logs for debugging. We updated our Nginx configuration the other day, and a small typo managed to sneak in... Luckily Cloud 66 noticed this and didn't apply the configuration, which would have brought the server down! Additionally, I use CX on a daily basis and it makes life a lot easier :)

As a new start up, can you please explain what your plans are for the next 6-12 months?

We're continuously monitoring the existing infrastructure to see how much mileage we can get out of it. The next obvious step would be to add a load balancer and scale horizontally to deal with any traffic spikes. We might also take a look at your database replication, for both reporting and reliability.

Is there anything you would like to add?

As a former Cloud 66er (I headed Customer Success), I know EatAbout is in the best possible hands with the great people there!

We are extremely happy to support an early stage startup and to work together with awesome folks at EatAbout! It was a pleasure to find out more about Philip and Felix’s ‘revolutionary idea’ and I would like to say thank you to Philip for finding the time to talk to us.


Are you working on something cool? Or perhaps you want to start using Docker? Get in touch or join our Slack Community to get some tips from awesome developers!


Try Cloud 66 for Free, No credit card required