2014 was an amazing year for Cloudways. We successfully moved from a consultancy-based, custom approach to cloud deployments to a completely automated and scalable cloud platform. We tripled our customer base, we grew the number of servers in our network by six-folds and we are now managing more than 5,000 active websites. And, we grew a lot as a company in the process.
2015 looks even more exciting and full of opportunities for us. Our main target and main challenge is to keep our service level while sustaining a similar growth than what we saw in 2014. We know that without an outstanding service level, our battle is lost. Service in the form of needed features in our platform, service in the form of proper care for your problems and service in the form of human answers for human questions.
What’s next for Cloudways?
So, let’s do a quick review of the core goals we have for the first quarter of 2015:
More Optimized Applications Performance
There is never enough to how fast your applications should run. We use Nginx, try to make all applications work with Varnish, and deploy Memcached. During this quarter, we are going beyond all this and reviewing our web stack and related services in entirety to get the extra boost:
- We are looking at CDN options to be offered as an addon most probably.
- We will take a look at HHVMÂ Â in our feedback page.
- We are running performance tests to check if MariaDB would give an extra edge over our current MySQL deployment.
- We currently use mod-php for its compatibility with all applications we deploy. We will revisit using php-fpm.
Credit System
We are going to deploy a new credit system with which we will be able to tackle several user requests.
First of all, we will be able to create longer term plans at discounted prices.
It will also allow for an account to run without registered Credit Cards, but with uploaded funds from different sources (for e.g., Paypal, Bitcoin, etc.).
More PHP Frameworks
You will be able to deploy different PHP frameworks along with your PHP stack, e.g. Laravel, Codeigniter, Symphony, CakePHP, etc. You can suggest yours here! You can go thorough PHPmyadmin vs Adminer and then you can decide which one to use for managing your databases.
The Stream
We are going to deploy a new section in our console called “The Stream”. It will basically be a chronological list of events and alerts related to your account. In our initial stage, you will be able to find there:
- Application and stack health alerts that you currently received via email
- Automated advice on when you need to scale your server
- Detection of wrongly configured applications (i.e., no proper Varnish integration) and option to fix in one click
Special attention to ecommerce communities
We are already well-known in the WordPress community and have thousands of blogs hosted with us. We are building a new team to take care of ecommerce (Magento, Prestashop, Woocommerce) communities, so we can adapt our service to what they really need.
We are firm believers in community driven road maps and with the help of this new team and the community, we will build the best possible experience for our e-commerce friends.
And, there are newer features coming in the next few weeks…
There are a couple more goals that are on the backend part, but these are not so interesting to you; however, it will make our platform much stabler.
And of course, these are the major goals. We will keep doing smaller items that you have been asking for in each of the sprints (fortnightly plans) we do. (We typically work with quarterly plans with the overall targets and fortnightly sprints to steer towards them). For this sprint, we have:
- White-list IPs from console
- Deploy New Relic Lite as an addon and Pro as a paid add-on
- More backup frequencies (1h, 3h, 6h & 12h)
So, we will definitely not be idle for a while!. As usual, I would love to have your input on this plan or any suggestions you may have.
Pere Hospital
Pere Hospital (CISSP & OSCP) is the CTO and co-founder of Cloudways Ltd. He has over two decades of experience in IT Security, Risk Analysis and Virtualization Technologies. You can follow Pere on Twitter at @phospital and read his blog at www.perehospital.cat
