PlushForums compares cloud hosts’ price-to-performance, chooses Linode

PlushForums, founded in 2014 and based in London, England, is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) company that builds modern discussion forums. The platform features real-time discussions, an integrated blog, member directory, private messaging, PayPal subscriptions, and a world-class mobile experience. It is designed to be user-friendly, eliminating the need for technical knowledge or plug-in installation. With subscriptions starting at $49 per month, users get a professionally hosted service that is fast, secure, and ready to use in two minutes. PlushForums aims to provide a beautiful and modern forum experience for everyone, ensuring that even those without technical expertise can easily set up and manage their forums. The company is committed to delivering high-quality service with features that cater to the needs of its diverse user base.

Before virtualization, self-funded start-up companies like PlushForums would have had to build and maintain a monolithic computing architecture in a single location and most likely subscribe to a pricey Amazon Web Services to achieve a public-facing cloud presence. The overall cost could prove prohibitive. The threat, great: No matter how well an application could be segmented into services and components, if that infrastructure “silo” failed, it failed for all customers simultaneously. The cloud seemed to be the answer. Spreading risk across numerous virtual servers located in diverse regions should alleviate catastrophic downtime for a start-up. However, until data centers spanned the globe, cloud customers in Europe, Asia or the Middle East would incur extended latency for having to rely on only North American data centers. Nevertheless, cloud computing’s inception became a fanfare for cost-effective computing performance and assured uptime. But this hasn’t always been the case. Still and a bit ironically, many hosting companies pay dearly for annual subscriptions for cloud access, data integrity and reliable system performance. IT budgets bloat, which can sink many shoe-string budget start-ups. Founder Adrian Flitcroft and the gang at PlushForums wanted to avoid those pitfalls to which digital startups can be disposed. To capitalize on the advantages inherent with the cloud, the PlushForums team established four mission critical objectives, including: Immediate, positive cash flow generation. PlushForums sought a means to scale its business without capitalizing large and bulky infrastructure overhead. As a global forum platform, PlushForums also required geographically diverse points of presence, to ensure minimal latency. Responsive and impeccable customer service with as little manual intervention as possible, to sustain automation of new deployments and onboarding. Customer data integrity. PlushForums can’t emphasize and demonstrate enough its commitment to protect and preserve its customers’ data. Achieving these objectives, PlushForums recently completed a successful beta-test period and is now in full production with clients in North America, Europe and Asia.

Linode’s API and Images data preservation tool help effectively manage infrastructure. Its RAM amount, CPU capacity, and I/O performance at desired price points deliver a favored and scalable benefit/cost ratio for start-ups needing cloud services. And its automatic backups feature preserved customer data independent of human intervention. According to Flitcroft, end users are very demanding and the private server market is highly competitive. After thoroughly researching the market, PlushForums found only a handful of companies able to supply optimum performance at an affordable price. Linode was one of them. “Primarily,” Flitcroft wrote, “Linode met our minimum RAM requirements at all key price points.” His additional research determined that Linode’s CPU and I/O performance exceeded all competing services at those same price points. This cost-performance ratio helped make PlushForum’s choice “that much easier.” “Pricing and performance at Linode – and other top-tier VPS providers – has given start-ups like us a new way to scale our business,” asserted Flitcroft. Linode’s API is a programmatic interface that automates sysadmin tasks like creating users and restricting permissions. Linode’s Images is a newly launched data preservation tool. PlushForums has found additional value in both features. Flitcroft’s staff considers the Images add-on as convenient containers for those apps that facilitate development and deployment. Such disk “snapshots” enable a user to freeze an entire stack at any point and retain the master image for future use. This constitutes an intuitive and agile way of managing infrastructure, according to Flitcroft, who further insisted, “Only a few cloud companies do snapshots/ Images well. The fact Linode Images works so well really smoothed the way for us.” And that’s important. PlushForums can’t afford to lose its customer’s images; to do so might impede new customer deployments. Sure, Flitcroft’s staff could reconstruct an image, but at the expense of time and money. “If (a cloud host) can’t offer redundancy on image storage, I would like to be able to download them for offline storage,” Flitcroft wrote. Fortunately, Linode satisfies PlushForums’ demand for an in-house back-up system -- complemented by Images. “We use Linode’s API and Images to create a new server for every single customer - in a geographically optimal location for each,” wrote Flitcroft. “As a result, each of our customers gets more dedicated resources, lower latency and greater resiliency.” For PlushForums users, this infrastructure model means its price plans are cheaper, while its systems are faster and offer more storage than marketplace competitors. That’s good for PlushForums customers, and good for a start-up, like PlushForums.

• Linode’s API and Images data preservation tool help effectively manage infrastructure.
• Linode’s RAM amount, CPU capacity, and I/O performance at desired price points deliver a favored and scalable benefit/cost ratio for start-ups needing cloud services.
• Linode’s automatic backups feature preserved customer data independent of human intervention.
• PlushForums found only a handful of companies able to supply optimum performance at an affordable price, with Linode being one of them.
• Linode’s API is a programmatic interface that automates sysadmin tasks like creating users and restricting permissions.

• 44.3% more requests per second processed
• Zero downtime