Recently Emakina, a digital marketing agency, shared with us their feedback about using Elastx Virtuozzo PaaS. Today we are glad to share our interview with Fredrik Larsson, Senior Developer from Emakina.
What was the challenge you faced?
In our early days we had opted for going with a managed VPS at a Swedish web hosting company. This worked well for several years as it gave us what we needed at that time - a place where we easily could host our clients and our own content. When we as a company and our client base grew and the projects became more advanced we ran into problems with performance, if one application got hammered all our clients suffered. We had to do something about it.
What was the solution?
With Elastx Virtuozzo (formerly Jelastic) PaaS we found what we needed. We feel a lot safer now knowing that every application is running in it’s own container totally separated from everything else. The ability to control exactly how much base performance and how much we want it to scale if needed has allowed us to handle any spikes our applications may encounter.
We also still have what we loved from the managed VPS, a fully configured environment at our fingertips, ready to be deployed at moments notice, without having to go through the tedious setup process ourselves, but at the same time allowing us to tweak the internal settings if needed.
Why Elastx Virtuozzo PaaS?
We were looking for cloud hosting for our apps. We tried using Heroku and similar platforms, but working mostly in PHP was not appropriate for us. Elastx Virtuozzo PaaS gave us a much easier way of deploying our PHP apps while still being a PaaS. Being a Swedish host also gives us great performance and low latency since all our customers are based in the Nordics.
What also changed was how we deploy our applications. Before we’d simply drag and drop the files in the FTP, but with the ability to tie an environment to a specific GIT-repository we quickly realised that this is it. We’re continuing to develop our processes around this way of deploying.
How have you set up your environment?
A fairly standard setup for our medium applications with a small amount of reserved cloudlets to keep the cost down during periods of low traffic but with enough scaling limit to handle high loads. This particular project is a mobile targeted newsletter that goes out about once every month to about 3-400 000 users, which gives a huge spike of traffic just following the sendout. We’ve also used the VPS feature to host an instance of Elasticsearch to enable text searching.
What was the cost difference?
The main difference for us is that we are now able to see exactly what each application cost. Before we were stuck with the same cost, no matter how many or few projects were up and running at a particular moment in time. This provides flexibility where we can simply turn everything off once a client’s campaign is over and turn it back on with a simple click during the next campaign period.
Did you see a performance increase?
The main benefit for us is that the applications are no longer sharing the same resources, one site getting hammered no longer slows down everything else. Also earlier we’d have to pay for a pretty beefy server to be able to handle the big loads, now we just go in, pull a slider to set scaling limits and don’t worry about performance.
Highlights of using the platform?
The ability to do almost whatever we want if we have to. Need an instance of some application not available as a package to run on the platform? Just throw up a VPS and configure it yourself. Hosting a simple WordPress blog? A few clicks and you got a platform running PHP and MySQL up in seconds.
Thanks, Fredrik! It cannot be said better :)
We are glad to know that Elastx PaaS platform with its automatic scalability, container orchestration and an advanced level of workload mobility became a proven technology for a great variety of companies like Emakina.
Read more emakina.com