Katapult by Krystal case study: Teaming up to take on the world

Case study - Katapult by Krystal

Founded in the UK in 2002, Krystal is a highly successful internet services company, hosting more than 200,000 websites for some 30,000 customers. Unlike most managed hosters, who customize a third-party cloud or resell a hyperscale solution, they built their own - Katapult.

“We have a problem-solving culture at Krystal, and we set about solving many of the problems people expe­rience with the larger public clouds, which can be slow, clunky and diffi­cult to manage,” says Simon Blackler, Krystal CEO & Founder. With Katapult, we built something that is simple to use but also incredibly fast, delivering millions of IOPs per VM (Input/Output Operations per Second per Virtual Machine). It spins up VMs in 25 seconds, and it’s very resilient, with triple data redundancy on disk. It’s also built from the best components. Our virtual disks run 128 slices distributed across 128 NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) disks – which means unbeatable read-and-writability.”

Katapult grew fast, running 4000 VMs by mid-2021. But to meet the needs of larger enterprises - and to capitalize on the solution’s scalability - it needed to spin up an equally responsive and robust global architecture.

“Within a decade we aim to be one of the largest cloud providers in the UK, with a good foothold in the USA and other markets,” says Blackler. “Considering the size of the compe­tition it’s very much a David and Goliath story, but we are already winning in certain areas.”

First on the list was the USA, where they started looking for a data center partner that met their technical needs and matched their values - “honest, reliable, and personal”. The perfect partner also had to meet their high ethical and environmental standards.