The methodology is a well-documented "Phoronix Benchmark Suite".
However, why in the world is this methodology relevant for the hosting service? Would any of you really do any x264 encoding on an outsourced server, or would you use your desktop?
I would much rather get apache running, and run the ab (Apache HTTP server benchmarking tool).
I might, actually. A huge part of the reason I own a VPS is precisely because I don't own a desktop, and having a persistent networked machine comes in handy often.
It is the same vulnerability at a fundamental level (it's virtually the same code), but it isn't exploitable out of the box in the same way Rails was, at least not on its own. However, there is a web framework, Grape, that was exploitable in exactly the same way that Rails was due to MultiXml's vulnerability.
And, really, technically, it was ActiveSupport that had this vulnerability. Even outside of Rails, had you used Hash.from_xml on untrusted user input you would have run into exactly the same issues.
YAML can still be loaded from XML response bodies, it just doesn't parse response bodies that are pure YAML anymore. Something like <tag type="yaml">yaml here</tag>.
We autoscale very, very quickly to serve all the jobs in our system. The only limitations we place are on test jobs, where they execute sequentially per account and only 100 can be processing or waiting.
Just curious - what's your customer base composed of? Is it mostly youtube knockoffs? Adult sites? Enterprise customers?
I understand if you don't share, but I'm just curious. I do transcoding at home from DVD to MP4 for place-shifting (I <3 Handbrake), but I'm thinking your customer would be some sort of video-hosting site. Are there really that many out there?
What kind of challenges have you faced wrt bandwidth?
We have a pretty wide range of customers. It's mostly websites today - niche video sharing sites (http://schooltube.com), blogging engines (http://posterous.com), content sites (http://www.giantbomb.com/), online video publishing tools, and other sites that accept video uploads. We also have mobile and enterprise customers.
You'd be amazed how many websites out there need something like this - tens and tens of thousands. Every website with an "upload" button that accepts video or audio files needs transcoding, plus many others. And since a site like Zencoder makes it possible to do complex things with video in 2-3 hours instead of 2-3 months, we open the door to a whole new class of video functionality.
Just to give another example for a Zencoder use case (although we're definitely small fry to Zencoder): one of our clients is an acting agency representing a small number (<50) of actors. Every actor has at least one showreel to be shown on the agency's website and they come in all formats.
Rather than setting up ffmpeg and dealing with the errors it can throw up, we just set up the upload form and Zencoder takes care of all the format conversions for us. If Zencoder can't decode it, it's safe to tell the client that the file is broken.
