Fast And Efficient Cloud Scalability: How PrestaBR E-commerce Development Agency Handles Traffic Spikes Using Layershift Jelastic Hosting – Case Study
PrestaBR is an e-commerce development agency, specialised in PrestaShop Platform since 2011. They are using Jelastic to host and manage medium and large size e-commerce stores they develop for their clients.
Jelastic is a cloud platform as a service, built to deliver instant server scalability for resource-intensive websites and applications.
Experiencing performance issues during traffic spikes and increased costs for hosting resource intensive e-commerce websites, Thiago Ferreira – Projects Director, decided to look for a better solution to host his client’s websites.
“We were looking for scalable hosting to control simultaneous access spikes” – Thiago Ferreira, PrestaBR
PrestaBR needed a reliable cloud solution that would help them scale multiple websites with high traffic needs. There are several providers on the market and Thiago tested and compared some of the most popular ones such as AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, before deciding to use Jelastic Cloud Platform.
“Jelastic is really amazing; it provides very fast and efficient scalability, both vertical and horizontal while also giving us the ability to manage multiple accounts simultaneously using a very user-friendly interface”
Finding the right Jelastic hosting provider
Jelastic is a powerful cloud platform offered by several hosting providers with infrastructure across the globe. There are several things to consider before choosing which provider is best for you; such as datacenter location, performance, customer support, server management level, price and others according to any specific hosting needs you might have.
After testing more than 20 Jelastic hosting providers, choosing Layershift was an easy decision for Thiago. The server performance and efficient customer support, included backups and additional services differentiated Layershift from other Jelastic providers.
“The quality of network and hardware are exceptional at Layershift. Their support is very efficient, friendly and competent. They offer backups to separate isolated hardware, a full copy every 6 hours, retained for 14 days. Also, they offer complementary services like CDN and Firewall with PCI Compliance. The service they provide is very stable and the prices are also great”
Benefits of using Layershift Jelastic
Using Layershift Jelastic has brought many benefits to PrestaBR, the most impactful being “simplicity and practicality, it gets much easier to solve various day-to-day problems” – says Thiago. He had no problem getting started with Jelastic as the extended documentation and support, plus a user-friendly interface allowed him to get used to working with Jelastic platform really fast.
“I had no problems to start using Jelastic, it was really easy. Consulting the documentation a few times, some small clarifications, I got used to working with it within a week”
Being able to scale your server resources to cope with high traffic demands at any given time, is crucial for any e-commerce business as it will directly reflect on your profits. PrestaBR wanted to offer their customers a hosting solution that is not only performant at scale but also cost-effective.
What about costs?
It is well known that e-commerce websites can be resource intensive and you can’t really predict the required resources in advance. Not to mention paying for extra resources you might or might not need, can easily drain your budget resulting in decreasing your business profitability.
Thanks to the pay as you use pricing model, Jelastic not only was scaling server resources according to traffic demand but also allowed PrestaBR to pay only for the exact amount of resources consumed, resulting in cost reductions for all of their customers.
“About costs, all our customers have been positively impacted and are extremely satisfied. A great example is the store www.westcoast.com.br, the saving is around US$ 6k/month”
PrestaBR has been successfully hosting e-commerce websites with Layershift Jelastic for over two years now. If you are looking for a cloud hosting solution that can easily scale and deliver high performance for your e-commerce store, you should give Jelastic a try:
Test how Jelastic can improve performance for your ecommerce websites with a 14 days trial offered by Layershift.
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!
Hats off to Jelastic’s leading team
We all know the famous expression: “birds of a feather flock together”. This saying is perfect to describe the amazing group of people whose work made Jelastic the best Java and PHP PaaS in the world (in our opinion!). We wanted to show you who’s behind Jelastic so that you can see for yourself how it became the awesome platform you enjoy today.
Here’s a look at the headline acts:
Cloud hosting experts
Mark Zbikowski – Designer of MS-DOS
Mark Zbikowski, veteran Microsoft architect and developer, designed the DOS executable file format and was one of the key developers of Windows NTFS and Windows 2000/XP/Vista. However you feel about the Windows OS, there’s no denying the significant impact Mark’s prior innovations made. He began his career at Microsoft in 1981, working on DOS 1.0 as a designer, coder and liaison with IBM. His impressive career has also included significant involvement in OS/2, Cairo’s Object File System (OFS), and the NT File System (NTFS). Mark’s recent addition to the Jelastic team adds unrivalled technical expertise.
Jelastic Cloud case study: Sooqini
Sooqini were named in the Top 20 UK Startups to Watch in 2013, and were also lucky enough to recently enjoy some high profile media coverage. We caught up with Nicholas Bransby-Williams, CTO at Sooqini.com to discuss how using the Layershift Jelastic Cloud helped them ride the wave instead of drowning in all that extra traffic / attention.
An overnight success
It’s not often that you can write about an overnight success and mean it quite so literally – but the aspiring entrepreneurs who took part in Startup Hacks last weekend achieved an amazing amount in such a short time it’s not an exaggeration to state it like that (well ok, it was over 2 nights if you insist!).
Within a mere 48 hours, eight talented teams of individuals came together, formed ideas, developed business plans, and built MVP models. I don’t know what you got up to this weekend, but I’m pretty sure you can’t better that!
At the end of it all, the teams stood proud, pitched their businesses to an impressive judging panel (composed of venture capitalists, tech. journalists, and startup incubators), and walked away with cash prizes – not to mention a potential £15,000 investment!