Tell us about your company (date of creation, location, target market).
We are a Swiss company based in Geneva, selling luxury men’s products worldwide.
What software and applications are you using to carry out the project? Why did you choose them and how do they solve the assigned tasks?
We have chosen to develop our websites and our own ERP in-house in order to have a solution tailored to our needs. We mainly use PHP and MySQL at all levels.
What are your and your customers’ requirements for cloud hosting?
From this point of view, reliable hosting with full control of our servers, supported by a high level of customer service, is most important to us.
Which hosting solutions did you use before? What difficulties did you encounter with them?
We had been running dedicated VMs for a few years. When our shop traffic started to increase, we experienced a lot of slowdowns and downtime. The managed service offered no flexibility in terms of server management and debugging was a slow and painful process. Changes had to be requested and even the smallest tasks took a few hours.
Why did you decide to choose Jelastic PaaS? What benefits helped you make this decision and what results are you getting now?
We decided to look for a hosting solution that would give us more flexibility and that would guarantee a high level of security and support.
Which Jelastic hosting provider do you work with? Why did you choose this provider? What results did you get in terms of performance and support?
We met the Hidora team at the Geneva IT convention, had a demonstration of the solution and chose to work with them. Our team was impressed with what Jelastic can offer. We have moved all operations to Hidora and are extremely happy with the change.
Why did you decide to use a local service provider? What is the role of personal and sensitive data regulation in your company?
The local company gives us easy access to support and people. We met with the team and were immediately convinced by their level of expertise and the proposed architecture. Security and data protection are our top priority, so it was essential to host our data in Switzerland.
What are your thoughts on containerisation? What difficulties (if any) have you encountered in migrating from a VM-based infrastructure to a container-based infrastructure? How are you currently managing containers?
The migration was relatively quick. Our team encountered some difficulties in configuring the servers to meet all our needs, but we received all the necessary help and support from Hidora’s technical department and, within a few days, all our applications were migrated. The result was an immediate increase in speed, uptime and user satisfaction.
What do you think of Jelastic’s pay-per-use pricing model?
Although price was not a deciding factor for us, we ended up cutting our hosting costs in half with Jelastic.
What DevOps technologies has Hidora helped you implement in your company?
Hidora helped us set up a Gitlab node and implement all the necessary workflows to streamline our development/production process.
Has it optimised business processes? If so, can you give an example?
We were extremely happy to be able to focus on the code and ensure that it would run smoothly on the servers we had access to. This transition has saved us an enormous amount of time and avoided many of the frustrations we had with the previous hosting model.
Please describe your stack, types of environment, architecture if possible.
Our typical environment includes load balancers, application servers, cache and storage nodes, database servers and SQL proxy servers. We host over 15 environments at the moment. There are also GitLab, backup and staging environments.
Highlight three main points that you like about Jelastic PaaS
The first is the great control over the nodes, which gives us great independence.
The second is the ease of use: you can set up a new environment and be in production in no time.
Last but not least is the fact that it is actively maintained and supported, and our feedback is taken into account.
