YouTube hosted its site at dedicated hosting specialist ServerBeach until November 2007, when the last of its architecture was migrated to Google, which acquired YouTube last February. To mark the departure of a mega-client, the staff at ServerBeach put together a farewell video recapping the joys and challenges of hosting one of the Internet's fastest-growing sites. Included are reminiscences on the manual invoicing system for YouTube, as well as the requirement for ServerBeach employees to spend time each day on the YouTube site "to make sure the servers were up."
Humorous videos aside, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen offers a testimonial on the ServerBeach site: "When YouTube first started to experience its exponential growth and our hosting needs changed, ServerBeach offered us great flexibility," Chen wrote. "They continually redesigned our streaming architecture for optimum performance while keeping our hosting costs in check."
