Hello World! Meet amazee.io, your new Drupal Hosting Provider

“Why another Drupal hosting provider?”

To put it simply: we are here to make every Drupal Developer’s life easier, anywhere on the world.

Amazee Labs has been building and hosting Drupal sites for over seven years, and during that time, challenges and client requests have demonstrated the need for a new hosting solution.

As a Swiss-based company, we were faced with a special task: our Swiss clients require a higher level of security and need hosting within Switzerland.

At that time, Drupal hosting providers didn’t have the flexibility of allowing hosting in just any country. We tried out the existing regular shared web-hosting options in Switzerland, but quickly gave that up. Shared servers were either lacking Drush support, don’t allow SSH access, ran outdated PHP versions, or went down at the first spike in traffic.

Our solution? Do it ourselves.

We built a hosting environment tailored to the unique needs of Drupal, with the Developer in mind. Everybody on the team involved with building this Drupal hosting system is or was a Drupal Developer.

We didn’t just want to recreate a single hosting provider, a copy of what already existed, we wanted to go deeper, to provide a system specifically created for Drupal, which could run anywhere in the world.

amazee.io: An Origin Story

We started working on amazee.io seven years ago and have spent the years since iterating on the system, learning from our mistakes, trying out new technologies, tweaking, and testing.

We’ve tested the bandwidth of amazee.io with some very big sites and the platform stayed up and performing admirably.

• The Voice of Switzerland, a live-results talent show, handled multiple thousand of users per second.

• The launch of World Monuments Fund and their 2016 Watch Site announcement was featured on international news sites like National Geographic. Users from around the world were able to access the site with no down time.

We faced the challenge of reconciling the difference between local hosting environments and that site’s production servers, which caused issues with different versions of services like PHP or MySQL. In response, we built a local hosting environment which used the exact same configurations and versions of all services (PHP, MYSQL, Varnish, Composer, Drush, Node.js, Apache Solr, etc.).

Recently a client requested implementing amazee.io’s hosting power within their own data center, which is a bit more complex. As our system is already built to host with any cloud provider, we needed to make some small adaptions (which we’ll address in a future post). Now we are able to host on-premises at almost any data center.

Not only did we work to make amazee.io fast and scalable, we also worked to improve automation. We added a continuous integration system that automatically deploys a site. All a developer needs to do is to push into a git branch and the site is deployed.

With the major areas tackled, we’ve since moved on to the bells and whistles of the project. We love Slack wanted to maximize its value as a communication tool, so we added a Slack bot which posts deployment information and status.

We have invested thousands of hours into amazee.io because we believe that it should be as easy as possible to develop, deploy and manage a Drupal site.

Drum roll please…

Beginning today, we are excited to announce amazee.io hosting services to the public. The system that’s been serving Amazee Labs and its clients is now available to you.

We could have kept this technology to ourselves, but that isn’t the Drupal way. To celebrate this release, we are opening up our Docker-based local Drupal development system to anyone looking for an easy way to develop Drupal sites in their local computer, for free.

If you’re interested in going a step further and using amazee.io for yourself or your clients, we can customize any solution to fit your needs. This includes:

• Your Drupal site can be hosted from our data centers in Switzerland, USA, or South Africa.

• If you need to host in another country we will find a data center in that country to partner with.

• If you like to host in your own or your client’s data center, we will setup a server for you there and even manage it for you, while you keep full access to the server.

We are very proud of this new venture and are excited to share it with the world. We invite you to join this journey and experience the amazing hosting environment that is amazee.io.

To get started using amazee.io for your business, contact our CEO Johanna Bergmann at hello@amazee.io.

To learn more about amazee.io, visit our website at www.amazee.io