freistilbox is an Enterprise Hosting Platform for Drupal and WordPress. It's designed to meet all three essential requirements for hosting business-critical websites:
- High Performance: freistilbox is designed to handle a huge number of concurrent requests.
- Scalability: freistilbox is designed to let you add capacity on demand.
- Fault Tolerance: freistilbox is designed to stay operational even if single components fail.
Distributed hosting architecture
In the architecture diagram below, you can see how web requests pass through the different components of the freistilbox hosting platform.
The Edge Router receives incoming requests from your website visitors and directs them to your freistilbox cluster. If your website uses SSL for secure data transfer, the Edge Router's built-in SSL Offloading handles all the necessary cryptography. This takes computational load off all other platform components and maximises your website's caching efficiency.
For serving your content, we provide you with your own dedicated freistilbox Cluster. A freistilbox Cluster consists of one or more Application Boxes that run your Drupal or WordPress code. Their number depends on the cluster size you choose.
Before requests are handed to your Application Boxes, they are processed by your cluster's Load Balancer and its built-in Content Cache. Only requests that can't immediately be answered with cached content are handed to your application boxes in an even distribution.
Each freistilbox cluster comes with a separate Shell Access Box. While this server does not deliver web content, your website code is deployed to this server in the same way as on the Application Boxes. This allows you to login via SSH and execute commands for website operation and maintenance without taking capacity from content delivery.
Your Drupal or WordPress applications can take advantage of a multitude of hosting backend services:
- Your web application databases are managed by a MySQL cluster.
- A file storage cluster manages your website asset files and stores them with multiple redundancy.
- For optimal search performance, you have access to a high-performance Apache Solr search engine.
- If your application relies heavily on cached data, using an Application Cache based on Memcached or Redis will give you much higher performance than using the database.
Enterprise hardware
freistilbox does not use public cloud infrastructure. In order to have complete control over our IT resources, we exclusively use physical servers hosted in multiple data centres in Germany. This avoids the "noisy neighbours" problem inherent in public cloud offerings where other users sharing your infrastructure eat up all available CPU, disk I/O or network capacity.
Our data centre location also has significant benefits for our customers in terms of data protection.
As you can see, freistilbox is much more than a dedicated server or a simple VPS in the cloud. It is a distributed hosting platform that gives your Drupal and WordPress websites maximum performance and reliability.
This was just a quick look into the freistilbox engine room. Would you like a more detailed overview of what makes freistilbox a world-class hosting platform?
Download our white paper!