In our Jelastic magazine I take a look at this multi-cloud hosting platform that helps you host WordPress with a user-friendly control panel.
Not a luxury performance here, because there’s a lot to cover. In short, Jelastic helps you create a highly scalable WordPress installation in the cloud as standalone containers or clusters. More importantly, it does this by eliminating much of the complex system administrative knowledge that would be required.
If that’s okay with you, read on to learn more about Jelastic and how it can help you host WordPress in the cloud…..
Tin test: What is
Jelastic is a multi-cloud platform as a service (PaaS). As far as WordPress is concerned, it is useful to host WordPress in a separate container or in a scalable server cluster.
If you’re not a developer, this can be a little confusing. I’m not a real estate developer, and that certainly confused me.
For a WordPress user it is easier to think of Jelastic because it is similar to Cloudways (or WordPress dashboards like SpinupWP, GridPane and RunCloud) but it has some essential differences:
- You can create server clusters or stand-alone servers. Creating clusters can normally be very complicated, but Jelastic makes it quite simple.
- It is a multi-cloud platform that provides a unified user interface for managing applications from multiple cloud service providers.
- Hosting providers can offer it on their own infrastructure (just like many shared hosts offer cPanel or Plesk).
It’s really too simple – Jelastic does a lot more than Cloudways. I’m just trying to formulate it in terms that might make it easier to understand if you’re not familiar with similar sentences.
Benefits of jelly: How it helps you.
There are many advantages to using a tool like Jelastic, but I have tried to reduce them to four factors that I think are quite unique to Jelastic compared to other comparable suppliers.
Creation of server clusters
One of the most unique aspects of Jelastic is the ease with which it allows you to deploy server clusters for your WordPress site.
With a normal WordPress installation there is exactly one server behind your website that takes care of everything. This is fine for simple locations with little traffic, but for locations with a lot of traffic it is not always the best solution.
Jelastic allows you to deploy multiple application servers, replicated databases and load balancers before sending traffic. If something happens to a server, your site is always loaded because there is another server.
What’s more, you can easily add new servers during traffic spikes (known as horizontal scaling), which helps you keep your site running even under heavy loads. More: Jelastic can do it automatically. Learn more about scaling…
Scale as required
In addition to clusters, another feature of Jelastic is the ease with which you can increase your resources. You can easily zoom in and out according to your needs without the need for special technical knowledge, which is great if your site has variable resource requirements.
Like preparing a show on national television? It’s easy to enlarge. In the middle of a crisis? It’s easy to zoom out.
You can also define your own rules, so that Jelastic automatically adjusts the scale of things to your needs.
Creating powerful WordPress installations
Jelastic uses a performance optimized stack, and the clustering/scaling technology ensures that your site always has the resources it needs, resulting in a fast loading of the WordPress site that can handle the scalability.
To confirm this, I will review Signal’s 2020 hosting criteria, which are about as objective as the criteria you will find in the hosting space. Jelastic, through her partner Scaleforce, has participated at different levels and has achieved first level status in each of them, which is quite impressive.
Pay only for unlimited use
Another big advantage of the Jelastic approach is that you only pay for what you use.
With most WordPress hosts you pay for maximum limits. For example, if you use a managed WordPress host that charges $75 for 100,000 visits per month, you pay $75 whether your site receives 9,000 or 90,000 visitors.
With Jelastic you only pay for what you use. For example, if your website receives 9,000 hits, it will cost you much less than a website that receives 90,000 hits.
You can set both minimum reserved resources (what you always pay) and maximum scale values (the maximum you pay if your site is fully scalable). I’ll show you how it works later.
Jelly gloves: Use of words
Now, let’s start with Jelastic, and I’ll show you how to deploy a WordPress site.
I’m not a developer, so if I can do it, you probably can, too. Overall, I found the interface surprisingly simple, given the complexity of the environment that Jelastic implements. Basically, I was ready to be overwhelmed…. but I wasn’t (although I won’t say I understood all the features of the interface).
In fact, Jelastik is very good at making things easy.
Before we get to the tutorial, let me remind you that Jelastic does not provide its own infrastructure – it works with on-premise hosting providers and large cloud providers. However, the actual Jelastic interface is the same regardless of the provider you use. I use Scaleforce as a reference.
1. Choose WordPressinstallation
When you connect to Jelastic for the first time, the basic interface looks like this. To start with one of the ready-to-use WordPress environments, you need to open the marketplace options.
You can then search WordPress to find six ready-to-use WordPress environments:
- WordPress Cluster Kit v2 – allows you to choose your own resources for your WordPress cluster.
- WordPress Cluster Business is a WordPress cluster with LiteSpeed servers and MariaDB slave replication. 16 GB RAM, 52 GHz processor, 100 GB shared memory.
- WordPress Cluster Enterprise is a WordPress cluster with LiteSpeed servers and a MariaDB Galera cluster. 24 GB RAM, 78 GHz processor, 200 GB total storage.
- WordPress Standalone Kit – allows you to choose your own resources for a standalone WordPress container.
- WordPress Standalone Starter is a stand-alone container with 4 GB RAM, a 12 GHz processor, 20 GB storage and 200 GB CDN.
- WordPress Standalone Pro is a stand-alone container with 8 GB RAM, a 25 GHz processor, 40 GB storage and 300 GB CDN.
Note that Jelastic’s cloud hosting partners can prepare customized WordPress packages based on the standard package (currently WordPress Cluster Kit v2), so you can see other options in other vendor markets.
2. Configuration of the WordPressInstallation
For our review of Jelastic I’m going to use the WordPress Cluster Kit v2 because I think it’s one of the most unique parts of Jelastic.
When you select it, you get additional options. For example, you can choose a scaling strategy that controls the speed at which the system responds to traffic peaks. You can make it more or less aggressive, depending on your needs.
You can also make further selections for specific functions. For example, if you uncheck the LiteSpeed server, Jelastic will use Nginx instead. Here you will find a long list of options such as firewalls, SSL certificates, CDNs, etc. There is also a window for customizing WordPress Multisite, which is good.
Finally, you can select your region. The availability of seats depends on the provider of the underlying infrastructure. With the Scaleforce configuration I only have options in the UK and Cyprus, but you can find other Jelastic providers offering data centers in the US:
Then click on Install and Jelastic will do most of the work. We’ll have to wait for Jelastic to get everything ready, so go ahead, have a coffee or something:
There you have it, you have a WordPress installation running on your cluster:
Pretty simple, isn’t it?
3. Operations/resource management
Once Jelastic has deployed your cluster, you will see all the components in the Jelastic interface. There’s a lot you can do here, so I can’t show you everything, but I’ll point out a few highlights:
First, you can change the topology of the environment, giving you truly granular control over resources and billing. For example, you can select the number of reserved funds (always available) and set a scale limit (maximum number during periods of high usage). You will also see the exact price at normal tax and the maximum amount you can pay at maximum tax:
You can also open additional modules to access important functionality for each part of your cluster. Some examples of what can be done with add-ons:
- Setting up a WordPress website address
- Install free SSL certificates with Let’s Encrypt.
- Switch on Fail2Ban
- Turn on the CDN
- Add new relay monitoring
- Enabling Git Push
- Et cetera.
There are other things you can do:
- View detailed statistics on the use of the different parts of your cluster.
- Browse the magazines to find out everything.
- Restart every part of your cluster.
- Edit the configuration files.
Final thoughts and how to start using jelly
Overall, I found Jelastic surprisingly easy. Although the environment is certainly suitable for agencies/large companies because of the resources it offers, it is not necessary to be an experienced system administrator to use Jelastic.
Anyone with some technical knowledge can use Jelastic to customize highly scalable WordPress environments, from standalone containers to clusters.
That being said, this is probably exaggerated for small to medium WordPress sites. It is more of a tool for high traffic sites, dynamic sites (where caching is difficult to use) or high traffic sites (where it is very economical to scale easily and pay-per-use), and production sites that need high availability and uptime.
If you just want to play with Jelastic, you can register with one of the available public cloud providers (some offer a free trial to start with).
You can also visit the Jelastic website to learn more and get started.
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