How HotelTonight Scaled Their Stack [audio]
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If you're breaking ground, awesome, you're doing something truly revolutionary. Would you be wowed if I built a Shopify clone off of Stripe and Squarespace? Or an app and site that performed ridesharing while simply talking to Uber or Tesla's backend? Probably not.
Ahh! There! Perfect example. I eagerly await the video, with baited breath, of a presentation from the team at Tesla rolling out autonomous driving using Nvidia's deep learning chipset. But if you build another Kayak, Hipmunk, etc, I do give you credit for grinding away on it if its a successful business. Grinding away on a business day after day for years is fucking hard. I'd just argue its not revolutionary or breaking new ground.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_Corporation
Disclaimer: Satisfied HotelTonight app user.
Which is totally fine and not a prerequisite for a business or tech business
This sounds pretty similar to how they describe it, actually:
"Elasticsearch came to our attention…" [... another thing ...] "Pretty much on the lines of what FriendFeed did..."
So basically they reimplemented what other people had done and written about. So (especially at this level of detail) not particularly useful compared to the existing resources they talk about having seen themselves. Later they talk about a big win being "introducing caching." This is all pretty well known stuff, at least in certain circles. And yes, other companies do things in different ways - scaling a single-source-of-truth schema'd database vs going schemaless and horizontal is a source of active debate - but they do talk about these ways.
(Though, something I've also seen personally: if you staff your startup with fresh 20-something grads, you're gonna have to rediscover it... but that's another discussion?)
As far as MySQL being the bottleneck, I'm kind of wondering why that is. I'd imagine 99% of their workload is both cacheable and read only, and thus infinitely scalable.
Anyway, I've used Hotel Tonight a few times and most of my experiences with the actual product have been poor. The price I could have got through the hotel directly in a few cases would have been better, and the other time they promised a King bed only to be rebooked at the hotel to a smaller room and double bed. It seems their business model is largely around selling unused inventory at hotels for as high a price they can get, without really caring about the customer.
You'll notice they have an absolutely no money back policy. In my case I was forced to take the lesser room which was actually cheaper had I paid for it at the hotel. Since that experience I deleted their app.
Hotels, like Airlines, love their hideously complicated rules around pricing - particularly for market segmentation.
Their mobile app is nice, and the flow is extremely smooth. I did once have to wait 45 minutes at a Best Western for their customer support to fax something across before I was able to get my room.
Don't get me wrong hoteltonights support is great but all in all cost isn't as huge of a reason for me to use them as it was when they first came out.
Not sure if that's a positive review or not, but it worked out for me.
One article in Bloomberg about trying to turn the company around and prepare for an IPO isn't the same thing. There is undoubtedly an order of magnitude (or greater) between the companies who have actually gone through an IPO and the number who have claimed they (or the press has claimed) will.