Welcome to Elasticweb

Good day, dear readers of Megamind. My name is Ilya Pestov. I've been doing web development since 2007. For all the time I had a chance to work on many interesting tasks. But now I want to tell you about our creation with our colleagues - Elasticweb .


Almost 10 years ago, when I opened my first HTML tutorial, most virtual hosting sites in runet for 200 rubles per month offered to host one site, 300 meters, a couple of FTP and databases. In general, today the situation has not changed. Increased only the volume of the disk and the number of various tariffs.
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Imagine that you have a regional business card site with low traffic on the tariff plan for 200 rubles, which is enough for 10 such sites. Then there is a need for a second similar project. In most cases, you will have to switch to a higher rate. This is utter robbery. Binding domains, it is absolutely nothing! And they say that the most marginal product is this SMS ...

Some may wonder what this is about me, when 2016 is the year of the year and clouds and VPS are available to everyone. So it is. Only, not everyone knows how to work with them, not everyone wants to customize them and not everyone has the opportunity to keep the system administrator at hand.

Moreover, there is another problem in the market of hosting services. These are traffic spikes caused by social services or publications in the media. In this connection, your project will hang or even fall. By the way, most of the virtual hosting sites have ad hoc limits, in case of exceeding which an ultimatum is set: switching to a more expensive tariff or turning off the site. Ultimately, the peaks fall and the traffic stabilizes. But jumping from the tariff to the tariff is not very convenient. And in the clouds, as practice shows, it is still fraught with data loss. And you have already overpaid for a whole month at least because of these few days.



In Elasticweb, customers do not pay extra. This is the first adaptive hosting with payment only for the used server hardware resources. We have no restrictions on the number of domains, subdomains or databases. Our system real-time calculates CPU% consumption, web traffic, traffic database, IO operations, RAM, disk space and database volume. On the basis of these data, the cost of services is formed. All statistics are available to users in the control panel.

Monthly maintenance of the n-th number of sites with a total attendance of 1000 people per day can cost ~ 30 rubles per month or less. Orient on the cost of the content of your projects will help our calculator.



We do not have monthly payments, invoice is issued daily. By analogy with cellular subscribers, our clients have a personal balance, from which payment for services originates. The balance may be negative for 7 days, after which the sites will be blocked, and deleted in a month. In the future, it is planned to develop a system of credibility to users. And now we have a referral program for our partners.

Elasticweb is also one of the first, if not the first shared hosting, which completely abandoned Apache and uses Nginx as a web server for better performance. For obvious reasons, .htaccess does not work. But besides the fact that we have configurations for most popular CMS and Frameworks, we have developed a unique editor of its kind Nginx configs. And most importantly - we are all absolutely free to assist in the transfer of sites.

Speaking of environment, we have PHP version 5.6 with Opcache. By default, Git, Composer, Drush, wpcli, antivirus and firewall are installed on each server. Itself is saboy SSH, sFTP / FTP access, POP3, IMAP, SMTP for work with mail, support for SSL, Cron tasks and other needs.

All of our servers run on Debian. The statistics daemon, with the frequency required for the resource, polls each user process and generates a report that is sent to the statistics server. Such a daemon is on every server. After that, the data is grouped by servers and accounts, and presented in the form of graphs in the control panel.



Instead of CPanel and ISPmanager, it was decided to invent their own bike. First: the adaptation of existing products under the “elastic” seemed to us a very voluminous task, which would require a lot of crutches. Secondly: we still have a lot of interesting undertakings and it is much easier to implement them on our own platform.

The very idea of ​​adaptive hosting came quite by accident in a banal conversation about hardware, servers and cloud technologies. A start was made in June of this year. After 3 months of gambling coding, an alpha version appeared. For another month, we tested the product on our own and ours. After that, it was decided to test the resulting beta version and the very idea to the audience Habra.

As a result, in the first 3 months, 1,500 people registered at the service, almost one fourth of them became our clients. At the moment, Elasticweb serves over 1000 domains, which in total collect more than about a million hosts per day. We processed 500 tickets and answered almost 5,000 messages. The average response time is 15 minutes.

Of course, we are working a lot on the functionality and are moving towards NoOps solutions, but I want to emphasize that we focus on the quality of technical support. Because we understand that whatever the conditions are, they have no value if the client’s problem cannot be solved promptly.

In our blog on Megamind, we will write about various tricks from Growth Hacking, talk about our love for statistics and methods of working with metrics, aggregate resources and tools of practical value for each startup, and of course cover the best practices from the western market.

Many thanks to all for your attention.