Case Study: The BlueBox reviews Jelastic PHP Cloud hosting
“The perfect mix for us”
The BlueBox are a SaaS provider and specialise in web-based business systems. The BlueBox was started in 1997 and have been developing sophisticated business system tools and at the same time providing system developers with a platform on which to build and refine web based systems.
They’ve recently joined Layershift and started using our innovative Jelastic PHP Cloud Hosting service so we really wanted to get in touch with Paul de Villiers – Director & Lead Developer at The BlueBox to find out more details about how they settled in and managed to get their application hosted in the Cloud.
Q: Paul, tell us a little about The BlueBox
A: Our core product is BlueBox2.0 a full-featured ERP system that includes modules for Sales, Procurement, Inventory, Manufacturing, Marketing, Financial, Human Resources and Publishing.
We consult our solution to small/medium sized companies and pride ourselves in being able to bespoke each solution to fit our customer’s exact needs. Our average customer pays around £500-£1000 per month for our product on a month-by-month lease.
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Loyalty bonuses for trusting us with your hosting
As you browse our new website you will see we’re now focusing our web presence on our two great dependable cloud hosting services, Cloud VPS and Jelastic Cloud, and wanted to offer all of those existing customers something special just in time for the Christmas rush.
Cloud VPS & Extreme – still dependable, but now even better
Like all of our loyal customers know, our Cloud VPS and Cloud VPS Extreme range (and its legacy predecessor VPS range) has been a pinnacle of the hosting industry for many years, and we continue to improve our exceptional managed hosting services by pushing these services even further.
All of our Cloud VPS and Cloud VPS Extreme customers will now enjoy the following three new benefits, effective immediately, and without any extra charge as a Christmas cloud hosting loyalty bonus from Layershift:
1: Supercharged RAM & CPU
All plans have received a free boost in CPU and most plans extra RAM! More space to grow your visitor numbers, host additional websites and increase your performance with improved page loading times and faster scripts.
Hack Manchester 2013 – Jelastic Challenge Round-up
Hack Manchester, the 25 hour “24 hour” coding competition right here in Manchester, UK, recently saw 230 developers descend onto MOSI over the weekend of 26th / 27th October to kick-start the Manchester Science Festival.
72 teams competed, with 30 projects eventually submitted to competition judges for the various sponsor challenges.
Layershift challenged teams to ignite their creative juices on our innovative Jelastic Java & PHP PaaS – with a cool £800 in Amazon vouchers on offer for the winners.
An amazing 1 in 5 teams took up the mantle and engaged with our particular challenge – and 12 out of the 30 final entries (i.e. 40% of all entries) used our platform in some way for their project, demonstrating far lower attrition for the wise teams who chose to develop on our Jelastic PaaS vs. those who didn’t. Startups take note here!
Phalcon PHP on Jelastic
Every developer knows that frameworks are a great help to implement a lot of application features in a very short time. Frameworks provide impressive development speed, but all of that power and functionality usually comes at a high cost – performance!
Writing your own code, line by line, can lead to a more efficient solution – but it’s so much slower to develop. What if you could enjoy the benefits of a powerful framework to do more in less time, but still end up with a high performance application instead of something you have to time with a calendar?
Frameworks intentionally do a lot of heavy lifting for you, but that means your “simple” one-line code is actually a lot more complex than you probably realise! It’s not their fault things run slowly – all of those abstraction layers and modules running as PHP code – expecting it to perform well is a big ask.
Let me introduce a real gem of a framework here to solve that problem for you – Phalcon. It borrows from the ideas of PHP: running as compiled C code (just like the PHP engine itself does). By removing that extra layer (PHP) and running the framework at a lower level it performs much faster. It’s a more lightweight and nimble creature.
Don’t worry, you don’t need to learn a new language to use it: all of your code is still written in PHP!
MongoDB Overview – NoSQL in Jelastic Cloud
Placed in 6th position on the DB-Engines Ranking, MongoDB is used by online giants like Forbes, The Guardian, Foursquare and eBay. This leading open-source NoSQL database enables these businesses to store articles, company data, venues or user check-ins.
Just like Jelastic, MongoDB’s built for scalability, performance and high availability. It also enjoys huge global popularity with over 4 million downloads, 100,000 online education registrations, 20,000 user group members and 20,000 MongoDB Days attendees.