Our current hosting product freistilbox is highly scalable, and compared to other enterprise hosting platforms, its pricing is unrivaled. But more often than not, customers tell us that not everyone actually needs a full Drupal or WordPress cluster which can scale to hundreds of websites. That’s why, after five years, we decided to launch freistilbox Solo, our new plan for web developers who need powerful managed hosting for a single website.

Today, we’re going to tell you the details of what we’re up to.

Developer experience

freistilbox Solo is designed from the ground up to support and enhance the workflow of Drupal and WordPress shops.

Development speed is one of the most important aspects in web projects, so it’s vital that your hosting platform offers an efficient way to deploy changes. That’s why freistilbox Solo will use the same instant deployment approach as its bigger sibling: the moment you push a change to your Git repository, it’ll be published on freistilbox Solo.

In order to support the usual development phases of development, staging and production, each freistilbox Solo account comes with three separate website instances. You can base all three on the same Git repository because our deployment process will automatically enable the correct configuration for each staging environment.

Alternatively, you can assign a specific branch of your application repository to each instance. For example, you could simultaneously work on and deploy from a “development”, “testing” and “production” (aka “master”) branch.

Visitor experience

All your website visitors, human beings and search engines alike, put a high value on performance. Being able to generate and deliver content quickly has a direct impact on both your sales and search engine rankings.

We will offer freistilbox Solo in three tiers that differ in capacity:

• freistilbox Solo S with 8 Processing Units and 10 GB of storage space,
• freistilbox Solo M with 12 Processing Units and 20 GB, and
• freistilbox Solo L with 16 Processing Units and 40 GB.

In case you’re not familiar with the term “Processing Units”, that is our metric for how many concurrent Drupal or WordPress requests freistilbox can handle, so another fitting term would be “application workers”.

In freistilbox Solo, we use the same technology that serves our current freistilbox customers, only on less complex IT infrastructure. This includes a high-performance LAMP stack plus

• Memcache for maximum application performance,
• Varnish for delivering static content at 300 requests per second,
• an SSL terminator that enables caching of encrypted web sessions, and
• Apache Solr for high-speed content search.

As with freistilbox Enterprise, all these system components are optimised for running Drupal and WordPress. And since they connect without any network latency, freistilbox Solo will deliver your website content with amazing speed.

Service experience

While freistilbox Solo does not require the same infrastructure complexity as freistilbox Enterprise does, there is still a lot to do in order to let our customers work efficiently and sleep peacefully. freistilbox Solo is fully managed and our operations team will take care of all the work required to run your websites at full performance. For example, we’ll make sure that the hosting software is updated regularly, that your data is backed up and that performance bottlenecks get eliminated. If there’s some new technology that can benefit our customers significantly, we’ll try and integrate it into our hosting platform. And if (well, rather “when”…) something breaks, our ops team will get on it immediately, day or night.

We are convinced that web projects are the most successful when developers and operations folks work towards the same goal. That’s why freistilbox Solo customers will enjoy the same competent technical support as our freistilbox Enterprise customers. We won’t leave you alone when you need help running your website.

Countdown!

We’re a bit behind schedule but the launch of freistilbox Solo is getting nearer and we’re already very excited! Soon, we’ll reveal the pricing and the exact date when we’re going to make freistilbox Solo available.

We hope to see your website fly freistilbox Solo soon!