FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Webapper Answers Frequently Asked Questions
One of our motivations to offer managed hosting in the AWS cloud was the fact that, through our consulting services, we observed so many customers paying substantial prices for “cloud” hosting, while getting little more than virtualized servers (if that). The more we learned about the AWS cloud, the more it became clear that it’s simply not possible to build, in a traditional hosting environment, what can be built in the AWS cloud. The technology is far more advanced than any other hosting platform available. Everything from self-healing/auto-scaling systems, to geographically distributed systems, to integrating new/modern design patterns into your software. What we have found is that we can build dramatically better systems, often for lower costs than our customers were paying previously. In addition, our support model is greatly preferred by our customers over the kind of relationship they had with prior hosting providers.
Probably. This really depends on what we build for you in our cloud. In general, as we’ve been moving customers to our managed cloud in recent years, we have found that we’re able to build better hosting for lower cost than what traditional hosting providers have been charging, many of whom are charging for “cloud” while providing little more than virtualized servers.
Our support model is one of the most popular features of our managed cloud hosting. Most support from traditional providers is either “set it and forget it” support for ColdFusion, where the platform falls behind in terms of updates and security patches, or, “finger-pointing” support, where you’re told that a problem you’re having is “in your code.” Because of our unparalled experience supporting ColdFusion-based platforms, together with our AWS training/accreditations/certifications, we’re able to provide a true full-stack support experience. Importantly, applying updates/patches to your ColdFusion runtime is included in your hosting fees.
We provide two primary kinds of support, as follows:
- Basic Hosting Support. This consists of the basic services needed to support you and your hosted systems, such as email/phone communication, security patching and other software updates, review/confirmation of backups, system monitoring, and minor service adjustments requested (e.g., opening a firewall port).
- Advanced Hosting Support. These are âheavy liftingâ services available to meet advanced needs for your system, such as assisting with better devops (continous integration/deployment, automated unit testing, etc.), implementing new cloud design patterns for better performance or failover, advanced programming assistance, and more. Advanced Hosting Support services are available at your request, tailored to a budget you set, and are billed at a discounted rate available only to our AWS hosting customers.
In addition, we can provide full lifecycle development services, either via our in-house development team (yes, your hosting company actually develops software!), or, via numerous staff augmentation solutions that we can help you utilize.
In keeping with current trends, this support model allows for a seamless collaboration between your development team(s) and your hosting operations.
Yes! Not only can we provide comprehensive support for administration of your ColdFusion stack (best practices, “How-to” help, Administrator settings, etc.), but we also apply patches and/or updates, to ensure that your system doesn’t become outdated over time, or insecure, or both. In addition, many customers allocate a budget (suitable to their needs) for Advanced Hosting Support, whereby we can provide “heavy lifting” support for your systems/applications (programming, tuning, testing, etc.).
The most commonly-provided technology in our managed cloud is auto-scaling. True cloud systems should scale up and down automatically, and we provide this for even simple, single-server systems in our cloud. Other examples include implementing auto-scaling off-server content delivery networks, batch processing solutions (e.g., CPU-intensive image manipulation), and more. Wherever possible, we are also helping customers achieve “infrastructure-as-code” for their systems.
Yes! The Amazon Partner Network sets high standards for training and accreditation/certification, and we’ve invested heavily in making sure we meet those standards. Here’s our listing in the APN directory.
Do you provide “lift and shift” hosting, or can you help me with implementing cloud design patterns?
Both, actually. Wherever possible, we’re helping customers to adopt cloud design patterns, in order to modernize their applications, improve performance and scalability, and more. That said, it often entails a non-trivial effort to refactor applications in order to leverage good cloud design, so we have to balance this with whatever budget and time constraints may be in place. The fact of the matter is that even lift-and-shift migrations into the cloud will yield dramatic improvements over traditional hosting environments.
If you already own Adobe ColdFusion licenses, those can be transferred to AWS servers, and we can help you to understand how the ACF licensing model applies in the cloud. Or, licenses are included in the official ColdFusion server images (“AMIs”) from the AWS Marketplace, and here again we can help you determine if these server images are a good option for your needs (both technical and budget needs). Finally, we have a long-standing partnership with an Adobe ColdFusion reseller, which allows us to secure discounted pricing for you if you need to purchase ACF licenses.
The AWS cloud supports any database needs you may have, and this includes NoSQL databases, data warehouses, and even distributed caching implementations, and also includes databases that we install and maintain for you, along with traditional RDBMS’s in Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS).
All of them. We support all versions/editions of Adobe ColdFusion, including, if necessary, those that are no longer supported by Adobe.
Absolutely. In designing our hosting offering, we wanted to be prepared to address one of the longest-standing complaints about web development, which is the lack of qualified developers. We maintain both an in-house application development team, and we also have partnerships in place to assist you with both onshore and offshore developers.
Yes. In 2016, we shipped versions 5 and 5.1 of our SeeFusion monitoring tool, which is included in your hosting fees. SeeFusion 5.1 includes integration with AWS CloudWatch, allowing us to auto-scale and self-heal your systems based on the most important internal metrics for your CFML-based system.
Of course! The fastest-growing part of our managed hosting is converting customer systems from Adobe ColdFusion to Lucee. As members of the LAS (Lucee Association Switzerland), we can provide as much support as needed to get your systems converted to Lucee quickly.