Introduction
The geekery found here, in all of its glory, elaborates on some finer points of CloudOptimus hosting. Our servers are meticulously handcrafted, and engineered for the ultimate in speed & security.
Included With All Plans
Comes with everything you see here, batteries not included. Woah, wait… what?! Could you imagine if you heard that in an advertisement for the Tesla Model S?
All of our hosting plans DO come standard with everything here, no assembly required.
Automatic Image Optimization
When it comes to speeding up your site, optimizing the images in your media library is one of the easiest things you can do, and it gives you immediate, quantifiable performance gains right off the bat.
For every image that you upload to your WordPress Media Library, we smush them down automatically, and losslessly (which means images retain their original quality but are reduced in size) so you don’t have to worry about a thing.
Automatic Nightly Backups
Sleep easy, rest assured knowing that your site is backed up automatically every night. Your backups are safe, secure, and always available should you ever decide to rollback or restore to a previous point in time.
Stupid Fast™
Faster than a virgin’s first time, you say? Yup 😉
All joking aside, your site is engineered for speed from the ground up.
- We roll our own custom Nginx
- PHP 7.x
- MariaDB
- Redis for many things
- Openresty on the gateway
Basically, this is the most modern server stack that our team of minions were capable of engineering. (In case you were unaware, our server minion robots are pretty damn good at building servers perfectly every single time.)
Global CDN
Got a CDN?
Huh? CD-what?
For the acronym-challenged, a CDN is a content delivery network. Basically three letters than mean your site is going to serve static content (audio, video, images, archives, etc.) not from the server itself, but directly from the CDN with impressive response times, and virtually limitless pools of bandwidth.
Take your podcast for example. The audio files are served to your audience directly from the CDN. People who want to listen to your podcast will download episodes from the CDN, relieving the server from having to do a ton of work.
Also, the CDN delivers your digital assets from the endpoint closest to your subscriber’s location. So you’ve got a listener in South America? Why make them download an episode from your server in North America when they can access the same file from the endpoint in Sao Paulo?
Here’s a map of the current edge network (spanning most of the globe) for the most optimal distribution of your data.
Free SSL
Every single website that is hosted with us offers a free SSL certificate. Your site gets the exact same SSL certificate as the one that’s installed on this website.
Does that mean your site will also get an A+ SSL security rating? You bet.
Speaking of security…
Total Security™
Along with ultimate performance, your server is secured and protected from the depths of the deep, dark Internet.
Servers on all of our plans include something that we call Total Security.
Total Security is:
- Free SSL Forever
- Web Application Firewall
- Real-time Malware Scanning & Protection
Read on for more details about our WAF and real-time malware scanning.
Our Cloud Providers
The CloudOptimus infrastructure is mainly built on two cloud providers: Digital Ocean and Amazon.
Digital Ocean
I met some of the guys from Digital Ocean back in May, 2012 as they were going through the TechStars program in Boulder, Colorado.
One fine spring day, I met with my friend Dan Andrews (developer at TechStars), and Jeff Carr (the CTO of fledgling Digital Ocean). We had an interesting conversation, which eventually got all of us talking about the implications of doing live website migrations between hosting providers. I had considered building a WordPress plugin (and did in fact build exactly this during May-Aug 2014) as part of a server-assisted migration that would make things easy for people who were looking to switch providers but frequently needed site migrations.
Anyway, fast forward to now… Digital Ocean has grown into a substantial and innovative company, venture backed by one of the most prestigious firms in the business – Andreessen Horowitz.
The Hosting environment at Digital Ocean is new, modern, and well executed. Servers of all sizes & distributions can be launched in a moment’s notice. The interface is simple and easy to use, yet powerful, and the API is well documented.
Currently, Digital Ocean has datacenters running in New York, San Francisco, Amsterdam, Singapore, London, Frankfurt, Toronto, and Bangalore. There are plenty of options (8 global datacenters to choose from) for the geolocation of your server, should you decide to run your server in close proximity to one of these locations.
Not only do you have seemingly limitless amounts of compute power at your fingertips, the platform they’ve created is simple and uncluttered, which is why I like it so much. It’s easy to navigate, and managing servers across multiple accounts/data centers is a breeze.
Amazon Web Services
There’s no doubt that AWS has become one of the largest & most well-respected cloud providers on the planet. I’ve been a customer since June, 2010. I’ve seen them suffer from growing pains, have multiple availability zones get knocked offline simultaneously by freak electrical storms, you name it, though I’m still impressed and to this day remain a happy customer. AWS is perpetually launching new services and more features alongside the plethora of existing web-scale applications & services offered currently.
AWS is extremely powerful, and also very complex, depending on what you’re trying to build.
Make no mistake, many thriving businesses are built exclusively on AWS. There’s no reason for that to change now or anytime soon.
Our Hosting Environment
In a nutshell, the CloudOptimus infrastructure is built on top of multiple cloud service providers. As much as we’d love to pretend they’re all perfect and nothing ever goes wrong, Murphy’s Law suggests that a small rate of error/failure is inevitable, and you can pretty much count on it. Our systems are built with redundancy in mind, such that if all of NYC were to suddenly go offline, your server will immediately moved and ready for business at the next closest provider capable of servicing requests.
Digital Ocean
- Droplets – The majority of our customers’ servers run on Digital Ocean’s cloud compute infrastructure.
Amazon Web Services
- EC2 – A few internal CloudOptimus services are powered by EC2 compute resources in at least three availability zones.
- RDS – Some of our internal & development databases are running here on RDS.
- Route53 – One of my favorite AWS offerings – Route53 is incredibly powerful, reliable, and arguably is one of the best global DNS platforms ever built.
- CloudFront – All CloudOptimus plans include CDN functionality out of the box. CloudFront is the primary provider for global distribution of the majority of our customers’ static content. The CloudFront service is reliable & really, really fast.
- SES – Simple Email Service is exactly that – simple email. While we do not offer bulk email services for our customers, all servers are configured to send system level & administrative email via SES.
- SNS – Simple Notification Service is used alongside SES for subscribing to various types of on-demand & push notifications alerts. These are very useful when developing internal applications, and again very reliable.
- S3 – And finally, Amazon’s Simple Storage Service. Don’t forget that Dropbox is built entirely on S3 (it’s that good). CloudOptimus uses S3 mainly for storing server backups & log data, as well as catering to the storage needs of customer sites with above average storage requirements.
Our Servers
While I began my career with Slackware, RedHat, Fedora, and CentOS linux distributions, I’ve gotten to be very comfortable with many linux distributions, including the Ubuntu distribution, as well as the smaller Debian-based Raspbian OS for Raspberry Pi embedded platforms.
All of our servers are built on the Ubuntu Xenial 16.04.01 LTS release.
Our hosting stack consists primarily of four letters – LEMP.
- L is for the underlying linux operating system (Ubuntu Xenial).
- The E (not the best letter, but makes the acronym pronounceable) stands for Nginx (pronounced engine-x).
- M is for MariaDB, the next generation of a drop-in replacement for MySQL.
- And finally the P which is for PHP-FPM.
I was a diehard Apache user for many years, though in the past 5 years made the switch to Nginx and have never looked back.
Our LEMP stack is fast, modern, flexible, heavily optimized, and tuned for extremely high performance on every single server that we run for our customers.
Our WordPress Sites
The moment that your server is created, right out of the box, your shiny new WordPress site is pre-configured & ultra-optimized for two things: Speed and Security.
Performance
With multiple levels of caching, from our primary traffic gateway/firewall, to the server, and finally all the way back to WordPress itself, our hosting platform is locked, loaded, and ready for some serious action.
Have you been featured by a major media outlet? Even with our Starter plan, your WordPress site won’t break a sweat during unexpected traffic surges. Our Starter plan is capable of servicing up to 3,000 simultaneous users and more than 35,000 requests in less than 60 seconds, with flawless rates of error and zero dropped requests, all averaging less than 300ms response time.
In other words, that’s a metric shit ton of traffic. Which could quite literally become a metric shit ton of problems if you’re still on shared hosting somewhere.
This was the actual load test that was performed on the server. (Yes, it really was conducted at 5:00 in the morning.)
Have you managed to get on the front page of Reddit, Hacker News, or Product Hunt? First of all, congratulations for your good work and making it happen. Secondly, you made a very smart, informed, and intelligible decision for your business by choosing to host with us at CloudOptimus.
Security
We don’t take security lightly. Which is why you can sleep easy, knowing that your servers & sites are well-protected from some of the biggest & nastiest shit lurking out there in the deep, dark depths of the Internet.
With all the malware, worms, viruses, rootkits, exploits, man-in-the-middle attacks, brute force attacks, evil spider bots, denial of service attacks, and who knows what else… why leave any of this to chance? This is your business that we’re talking about here.
Much like paid CloudFlare plans, CloudOptimus provides equivalent levels of Internet security, standard for all plans.
Our hosting platform scans, filters, and drops/denies/blocks a ton of nasty traffic before it gets anywhere near your site. We block bad bots, spiders, and worms that you don’t even want to know about. We offer denial of service protection, so should your site get caught in the crossfire of a distributed attack, CloudOptimus is your shield of protection, your invisible forcefield, your site’s automatic counter defense system, keeping your site clear from harm’s way and protecting your business proactively around the clock.
Our servers also perform real time malware scanning of WordPress user files, and we’re equipped to take immediate action – to quarantine & mitigate identified risks – should they ever surface.