Do you still remember these text messages you should not have sent last night? SMS von gestern Nacht (“last night’s text message”) does! The entertainment website publishes texts from its users that are simply too good, funny or rad to be read only by their original recipient.

SMSvonGesternNacht.de has been running on freistilbox since 2013. We thank the founding team for their following feedback:

Why we chose freistilbox

Our first contact with freistil IT was already in 2010 when they still offered their hosting under the name “DrupalCONCEPT”. We were looking for good hosting solutions for Drupal and had found freistil. Back then, we decided on a single managed server from another provider. Over the years, we extended it to a group of three servers. When we planned a relaunch in 2013, the Drupal experts from Palasthotel recommended a switch to the freistilbox hosting platform that they praised enthusiasticly.

Out of experience, we wanted to build on a proven and reliable solution. To learn the detail aspects of freistilbox, we invited Markus from freistil IT to our office in Berlin. In this meeting, we worked out that freistilbox would cover our needs very well. Its caching infrastructure, optimised for Drupal, promised high delivery performance for our many anonymous visitors. At the same time, the price was very attractive; we don’t pay significantly more for freistilbox today than we did previously for our managed servers. freistilbox brings additional advantages, too, for example the developer-friendly design and the fast technical support. The easy scalability is another important factor because our traffic grows steadily.

Our hosting setup

At launch, we started with a cluster of two freistilbox S. Since performance is more important to us than availability, we decided after a short time to switch to a single freistilbox M.

The launch

Our start with freistilbox was a very good experience. With one exception, everything worked out of the box. And the problem that our voting feature at first didn’t work because of the necessary extra cookie was quickly resolved by the freistil team with a custom cache configuration. The target-oriented way we discussed and solved this problem together with Palasthotel in a “war room” chat conducted by freistil IT significantly increased our trust in the team’s competence.

Daily operation

Hosting on freistilbox is fun because we don’t have to take care of anything. freistilbox simply works and we notice little of daily operations. Our questions usually are answered in much less than 24h and contact with the freistil IT technical support always is a pleasant experience.

If there is a problem eventually, someone immediately deals with it. At the end of 2013, our website suffered from network issues, today our availability is 99,9% even without redundant servers.

Since the launch on freistilbox, our traffic has more than doubled from about 18 million to 40 million page impressions per month. The highest traffic spike has been 1.5 million PI on a single day. The website still runs with full performance without us having to grow our configuration. We’re now considering allowing user logins which would probably require an expansion.

freistilbox leaves little to be desired. Comprehensive statistics that show how well our cluster is working would be a great additional feature, though.

freistilbox clearly holds up to its promise “work efficiently, sleep peacefully”. When the next vacation comes up, we’ll be able to go on holidays without worrying about our hosting.