Postful, Inc.

Success at a Glance

An estimated 65 million Americans do not go online. Postful, Inc. was founded in 2006 to enable those who use e-mail to correspond with those who don’t.

It’s easy to use. Send an email to quickletter@postful.com. Put an address in the subject line and hit the send button. The e-mail is printed on paper—with photos if they’re included—and mailed in a traditional envelope. The cost is $.99 for the first page, $.25 for each additional page for a domestic letter, and more for an expanding international service.

“Most of us know people who can't receive e-mail,” says Postful founder Justin Garten. “For me, it's my grandparents. We'd like to write, but between stamps, envelopes, printing, and mailing, it doesn't get done.” Postful bridges that gap as a print and mail utility for the Web.

It also serves business customers. “We give the smallest firms, and mobile workers, the resources of the largest corporate mail room,” Garten says.

Founded in Los Angeles in 2006, Postful hosted its service on a virtual private server (VPS) and then migrated to its own Linux-based servers. “We needed more reliability,” Garten says. “We began an extensive search for alternatives and chose the Sun Startup Essentials Program.” The program gives entrepreneurs access to free software and enterprise-grade IT products at especially low prices. As part of the program, Garten chose to have Postful hosted by Sun partner Joyent, Inc., once Joyent’s CEO convinced him of the benefits of the Solaris 10 Operating System.

“The Sun Startup Essentials program was my first direct contact with Sun,” says Garten. “I have to say I’ve been deeply impressed. The advantages of Solaris over Linux became clear. Running on Solaris 10 Containers, the overall stability of our system is superior. Faster reboots through Solaris Containers have meant that major transitions which previously took hours can now be literally done in seconds. ”

Hosting costs have decreased by 45 percent yet performance has improved by 30 percent. Time to market has been reduced from months to days.

In addition, time spent on server maintenance has been reduced by more than 50 percent, accelerating application development. “Just the use of SMF scripts for automated recovery after reboots or failures has dramatically decreased the amount of time we have to spend dealing with server issues,” Garten says. “In terms of basic setup, the work that Joyent put in to optimize the basic setup for Rails deployment saved us about a month of work at the start.” Sun's Identity Management tools help accelerate application development by reducing the time needed to add new users or update directories.

Also, the Sun platform will reduce power, and cooling costs by a projected 80 percent, and the server footprint is 50 percent smaller. “Another benefit is that we’ve made good use of Sun’s online help and documentation. The quality of that documentation is one of those hidden advantages of working with a major vendor,” Garten says.

“Deploying on Solaris is simply an easier and better experience than deploying on Linux,” he concludes. “We have committed our full deployment to Solaris and have not looked back.”