The cloud stack that helped SendHub scale to millions of messages

Ash Rust is Co-Founder at SendHub. He studied Computer Science at Oxford.

SendHub seeks to be the replacement to your outdated phone system. When we started SendHub it was to help teachers reach students and parents, but we’ve since grown to be a complete business phone system, you can use from any device, anywhere.

In order to provide the fastest setup times and the simplest service, we built SendHub for mobile apps and the Web, all synced in the cloud. Operating in the cloud gives us a range of benefits. For one, adding your whole team onto SendHub is simple, and can be done in seconds with a few clicks. Working from the cloud also let’s SendHub scale with your company, so as more people join your team, you simply add more SendHub phone lines. Additionally, SendHub users are not locked to a desk for their business communications.

Companies use SendHub for a wide range of use cases. For internal use, we offer calling and texting with coworkers and the group texting is very popular. We also offer marketing services allowing our customers to quickly deliver messages to their customers. Sales and support teams benefit from our auto-attendant and group ring features, which allow an inbound call to ring on multiple devices at once. Finally, developers user our API, because it allows them to integrate SendHub into their own product to fit their needs, for example we have a college tutoring company using our API to collect student contact details and then arrange their tutorials.

SendHub is written with a combination of Python, javascript, objective C and Java. SendHub sits on django, flask, and backbone and is hosted on AWS. For storage we use postgres, redis and we custom built and open sourced our deployment tool: Shipbuilder. These highly flexible and extensible cloud platforms and software packages have allowed SendHub to quickly scale to many millions of messages and minutes each month:

  • New Relic "Monitoring of web and platform performance. Its expensive, but it provides one of the most comprehensive solutions available today."

  • Pusher "Realtime WebSockets as a service. Scalable and Cheap."

  • Amazon EC2 "We use AWS for general hosting and Elastic Search. For us, it’s cheaper than Heroku, but more expensive than other hosting providers. However, it’s battle tested at scale."

  • TestFlight "We use this to Beta Test our iOS and Android Apps."

  • Bugsnag "Error aggregator and correlator. Tells us which bugs are related and helps give significance to the errors that show up within our system."

  • Splunk Storm "We use this for log analysis to look back at what happened when we had problems."

  • GitHub "Powerful collaboration, code review, and code management. We use this for our open source and private projects."

  • Leftronic "Data Dashboards. We display all of our key metrics in the office using this on large displays to keep everyone up to date."

  • Chartio "Great for custom analytics, although requires SQL expertise as our database is sharded."

  • Mixpanel "Event based analytics, not cheap."

  • Google Analytics "Ubiquitous Analytics."

  • Asana "Teamwide planning. We use this more than Email."

  • Google Apps "Gmail and we use Drive to collaborate on documents."

  • HipChat "Use it for internal communication, mainly because we need a system off SendHub in case we’re having issues."

  • Zapier "Great for automating basic tasks between cloud services. Doesn’t require any code."

  • Stripe "Billing system. Works great and supports complex billing scenarios."

  • Hackpad "Company wide wiki, easier to edit and track than Google Docs."

  • Insightly "Stores and tracks leads, integrates nicely with Tout, and Gmail. We just enter a lead and use Tout to automatically keep a record of the email."

  • ToutApp "Integrates with Gmail and pulls email addresses off websites. Provides templates for easy communication."

  • Wufoo "Used in conjunction with Olark to capture and funnel leads to sales personnel"

  • Olark "Talk in real time with customers. Both the sales team and support team use it with great success."

  • Desk.com "We use it in conjunction with Olark and Gmail to offer email based customer support."

To get 15% off any SendHub plan for the first month, email Beau Martino.