Two years ago, if you asked John Schulz what kept him up at night, he would’ve told you two things: performance and security. The Ample Innovation founder was spending countless hours managing VPS servers, security, and maintenance for his clients’ websites, not to mention having to drop everything at a moment’s notice when hosting would fail and a site would go down.
After years of dealing with inadequate shared hosting, VPS, and even managed WordPress hosting companies, he was exhausted from the rollercoaster required to keep his business running smoothly. He knew there had to be another way.
So Schulz set about researching how he could build his own Docker container-powered hosting platform, one that he could eventually promote as a service for other agencies. Seeking advice, he reached out to a friend, Tom Fanelli, and quickly learned that Fanelli had not only had the same idea for high availability hosting, but had started pulling together a team and had bootstrapped an MVP, which would become Convesio.
“I couldn’t believe it. I told him right then and there that I was stopping all development and research on my own project and wanted to join forces with him and become a Convesio customer,” Schulz says. “I haven’t looked back.”
Here’s how Schulz has become an advisor to Convesio and how he was able to offload the performance, security and maintenance of his clients’ site, saving him several weeks of time annually.
About Ample Innovation
Since 2013, Ample Innovation has provided world-class software solutions for real-world business problems. Specializing in custom WordPress, app, and enterprise-level software development, the company focuses on delivering well-designed, user interface-driven technologies centered around user experience best practices.
Schulz, a developer by trade, is also CTO at Ellipsis Technologies. The company is best known for developing Human Presence, a technology that employs human-centered learning algorithms to protect websites against suspicious activity, including form spam, fake account creation, and bot-based checkouts.
While Ample Innovation uses Convesio to host 40+ client websites, ranging from small ecommerce shops to brand awareness and brochure sites, Ellipsis Technologies uses Convesio to power its small blog.
The challenge: performance and security
From managing different VPS servers to patching security issues, troubleshooting downtime, and maintaining the dozens of WordPress sites on his books, Schulz was spending hours every week taking care of client websites.
For some of the larger sites Ample Innovation hosted, the performance was an issue, due to unreliable, traditional hosting platforms. But security was Schulz’s biggest concern as it was throwing up roadblocks for some of his clients.
“I would have to put in place measures — carry out security audits using expensive, overly-heavy footprint plugins, just to keep security issues at bay,” he says. “I became sick of settling for the hassle, inadequacy, and security-starved traditional shared hosting, VPS server hosting, and even WP specific host environments that kept failing me.”
Something needed to change. Ample Innovation needed secure, performant and highly available hosting for his clients that wouldn’t buckle under the pressure of sudden or unexpected traffic. He needed a hosting platform that was redundant, managed backups, and could quickly scale, all without costing a kidney.
The solution: enterprise-level stability and blazing fast speeds
After reconnecting with Fanelli, an old friend he hadn’t spoken to in a while, and discovering he had created the kind of unicorn hosting he had wanted to create himself, Schulz immediately switched all his client sites to Convesio.
“I couldn’t believe it. I told him right then and there that I was stopping all development and research on my own project and wanted to join forces with him and become a Convesio customer. I haven’t looked back,” Schulz says.
He says Fanelli had figured out several of the “toughies,” including database clustering and dockerized WordPress containers, plus all the benefits that go hand-in-hand with Convesio’s scalable hosting architecture: it was self-healing, performant, and delivered robust enough security in the initial offering that he could remove all the “silly” security plugins he had been paying annual subscriptions for.
“Even while developing the main proof of concept, Convesio was already showing so much promise and stability. It was head and shoulders better than anything I’d used on the market up to that point, including overpriced managed WordPress hosting,” Schulz says.
Convesio provides enterprise-level stability out of the box, which you don’t get anywhere else without paying a hefty premium. And the best part, says Schulz, is that every customer gets this by default.
“Convesio has chosen to take advantage of the latest advancements in containerized hosting technology and have figured out all of the hard things, making that the base offering, rather than trying to come up with some tricked-out NGINX configuration, highly-optimized server specs, or other things that come at a premium to the hosting provider,” says Schulz.
Other features that have allowed Schulz to offload most of his client site management including easy Let’s Encrypt SSL integration, simple domain mapping for multiple domains per site, built-in caching, the ability to modify PHP params, the ability to change PHP versions on the fly, and automated integrated backups.
What’s more, he says, Convesio is “blazing fast” and provides rock-solid security.
“The day I switched to Convesio, both of those problems went away and I’ve not thought about them since,” he says.
