Talking High Performance Silverstripe with Sunny Side Up
Web developers report incredible gains for clients who switched from custom hosting to High Performance Cloud Containers.
Sunny Side Up is a web development agency in Wellington with clients in New Zealand and Australia. They’re Silverstripe specialists, and they’ve been with SiteHost long enough to become the first customers to feature in our blog twice. More importantly, as we heard from founder Nicolaas and Project Director Martijn, they’ve migrated clients to High Performance Cloud Containers and seen some amazing results.
Thanks for catching up with us again! Let’s start with Silverstripe and how it’s fared since our last chat in 2020.
Nicolaas: When Silverstripe first started it was on a quick trajectory. It was a rising star that all of sudden had all those Government contracts, the Democratic Convention in the USA, and so on, like wow! It was a bit like a rock band that became really famous, real quick; and then the energy fell out a little bit. Now it’s like they’re in their fifties and they’re coming back on tour. They’ve knuckled down and gotten all of their processes, like core product upgrades, really tight. The quality of security and everything is really high.
For a few years I was questioning it, but I feel much better now. Innovation was a little bit lost and I feel like that’s now coming back onstream. There’s a great future for the segment of the market that they serve.
Comparing Silverstripe with other products in that market, it does very well.
How busy are your clients’ websites?
Martijn: The biggest site we currently run gets about 25 million requests a month, the smallest around 5000.
Let’s talk hosting. You must have seen a range of Silverstripe Hosting set-ups over time.
Nicolaas: Our customers have hosted in a variety of places. From a hosting perspective Silverstripe has simple requirements, and it is interesting to see that some website owners are penny-wise, pound-foolish when it comes to hosting. This attitude increases development cost and often reduces performance significantly.
People should be coming to SiteHost in droves.
You got in touch with us to share some data from a recent migration. What did you see?
Martijn: We recently migrated an important New Zealand site from a major NZ hosting provider to SiteHost. This major provider had the system set up across six servers, three each for production and testing, each with four cores and 8 or 16GB. It was slow, it wasn’t performing, it was plagued with high maintenance costs. When we were asked to provide our solution, we looked at the code base and couldn’t see why it was on six servers. It simply did not add up.
We put the system on one SiteHost Cloud Container server, with 8 High Performance cores, and yesterday I was thinking that we needed way less. We’re using 8-12% of the machine’s capacity! Loading times went from between 1 or 2 seconds to around 300ms.
Were there any code optimisations as part of this project?
Nicolaas: No, it was a like-for-like move from one to the other. As a comparison, it was very good validation: we’re doing the right thing by moving to SiteHost.
Have other clients seen similar improvements?
Nicolaas: Yes, in another move for an Australian client to SiteHost from AWS we immediately saw the speed improve. On AWS you can do whatever you want, you can build an intergalactic battleship, but in reality, you often end up with mediocre outcomes.
Presumably they were paying for something better than that?
Nicolaas: Their AWS base price was quite little, but with all the bits and pieces that went up quickly. For example, the database kept maxing out. We couldn’t get it right. There was some heavy import functionality and every time it ran, the website would become unresponsive. In AWS you have so many options available. It’s complicated and to figure out what’s appropriate you really need to be an AWS engineer as well as having a good understanding of the application at hand.
To talk to a real person at AWS, the client paid an additional US$100 a month, and the real person was basically just copying the help files. All we wanted was just a five-minute chat with a senior engineer at AWS, but we got a three hour discussion without a resolution. In the end we took a stab in the dark and ended up paying about another US$100 a month for a database. It worked ok - but it felt clumsy.
So the costs had gone up, and it kind of worked, but after paying for a couple of months of help, we were left wondering if we did the right thing.
How would you summarise the AWS experience?
Nicolaas: People think with AWS that everything is there. But that’s just the baseline and you have to build everything on top. Everything. That is very costly and total overkill for most LAMP websites, which just need a tried and tested recipe that is continuously enhanced and patched to stay ahead of the pack. Sort of what you do at SiteHost.
What is that client hosted on now?
Nicolaas: We moved to SiteHost, one of your smaller managed packages for about $300 a month, and the database wasn’t an issue at all. It’s really fast. We never looked back and the client is very happy.
Martijn: And if we need to talk to an engineer, we can. Clients need to understand the value of that, because they pay for our time. So while we were wading through AWS documentation for hours, we had to charge for that. If I give SiteHost a call, it’s 15 minutes, and we get a proper answer.
What would have been different if you and your client could have avoided AWS from the start?
Nicolaas: The difference is twenty years of building on top of experience, versus reinventing that hosting wheel.
We knew the path that we were taking, we executed, and we went live like we were flicking a switch.
Related article: AWS finally agrees that customers can save money by leaving the cloud
What do you think leads people to make inefficient or uneconomic choices?
Nicolaas: Larger companies will say they need a custom set-up. SiteHost hosts a lot of websites, and you kind of have this Cloud Container recipe. But large customers think that they need something special, often without being able to articulate why.
Why do you think that is?
Martijn: When I reflect on sales conversations, we’ve sometimes missed the boat because we’re too straightforward. They think something’s missing, that what we’re saying can’t be true.
Nicolaas: So they’ll talk to a so-called cloud specialist about a setup, but that person doesn’t necessarily know about PHP or their application, or understand the risks of customisation very well.
As the developer, how do you find your conversations with those enterprise-level hosts?
Nicolaas: When enterprise people step into the LAMP hosting environment it doesn't match with the other software they use, like perhaps SAP. Questions get raised about all sorts of things, like, ‘Oh really, you want Git? What version?’ and this goes on and on.
It takes much longer than expected - for example with an Australian client we ended up in a year of meetings, probably twenty of them. That’s twenty times an hour that their IT manager will never get back.
We got some set up but we still weren’t there. When we went live, it didn’t work, it fell over and we had to do it again.
My underlying sense is that, if you go the custom route, you end up with an inferior product at a much higher cost. It would make more sense to use a hosting specialist like SiteHost and request additional features if you need them.
You’ve mentioned that Silverstripe Hosting, or LAMP hosting, doesn't need to be complicated, but are the builders of custom environments underestimating it somehow?
Nicolaas: They don’t understand it, they try to do something customised, but that throws away 20 years of experience that SiteHost brings to the table. You have created a simple solution, but you can only do that with lots of experience in the area.
Martijn: Imagine someone asks for a sports car that seats two people and can do 200MPH. We say, take a SiteHost Ferrari and they say no, we need to build something. Then they end up with a tractor with speedy tyres. That’s that experience.
You made a Frankenstein hosting monster! Why are you making it so tremendously complicated with microservices and additional load balancers and caching servers and the whole shebang? It’s not going to be faster, but it is going to be more complicated to maintain. That's the reality of what’s happening.
Nicolaas: It is, but it’s hard for us to get people to understand that custom isn’t the way to go. Of course, there are many considerations; but as a whole, if it takes a year of tuning before you can move your website; that in itself seems like a much bigger risk than anything else.
What’s the main objection that you encounter?
Martijn: There’s one that’s complicated to crack. If you can do things a lot cheaper you should be a threat to your competitors. But I don’t think people believe you if you’re too cheap, even though it’s hard for them to say so. The mental gymnastics that people have to do to come to grips with the fact that they’ve grossly overpaid in the past is very hard.
So if we say a thousand bucks will get you everything you need, but another party is charging thousands just for setup, 50-something for this, 12 hundred for that…the impression is, wow, they must be way better!
Nicolaas: It’s not just hosting. We’ve been in a situation where a competing web development quote was ten times higher than ours. And vice versa, that can happen too. As an industry, I would like to see more transparent pricing and honest conversations.
Martijn: An employee given that choice will take the more expensive one for one simple reason: if it all turns to custard you can tell your manager, ‘I didn’t choose the cheapest one. I’ve been cautious’.
How can we get the world to understand that things don’t have to be that expensive anymore? I don’t understand how hosting prices over the years have gone up instead of down. Moore’s Law still applies. We can show you the numbers.
As you gain more experience with the speed of our High Performance hosting, are these sales conversations getting easier?
Nicolaas: High Performance Cloud Containers have made a huge difference. The value is just obvious; like: yep, we need that.
Martijn: From a sales perspective it’s easy to explain that if we do use you, it’s going to be faster. It’s so robust. We recently ran a load test with one of our larger customers at two-and-a-half times the capacity we’d designed for, and we saw nothing. It just kept pumping out pages. When we show that data to clients it’s tremendously powerful.
We make assessments based on the number of visitors, knowing that it’s a Silverstripe site and we can cache the heck out of it. Say 50,000 visitors a week, that shouldn’t be too complicated. We’ll do that on two cores.
We also don’t mark up SiteHost prices. We give our customers your cost, which is a fair price, and charge for our services next to you. This is by far the best deal for clients.
Lastly, when we talked in 2020 Sunny Side Up had recently gone carbon positive. A few more years on, how is your business approaching sustainability?
Nicolaas: A lot of things have changed. It was trendy and new in 2020, and since then lots of companies have done things like go for B-Corp certification. We’re in a bit of flux at the moment, asking what we can do that’s meaningful.
The cost of offsetting our electricity use was quite hard to calculate, but quite low in terms of actual impact. Ultimately, the calculation became a lot more costly than the offsetting! It’s got to be better for a small company to focus our efforts on doing something more positive, rather than put a lot of effort into the calculation.
We are currently in the process of developing new ideas around our best response to the climate crisis, in our own small way. Also, we were super stoked to learn about your solar panels. Impressive. It is that sort of leadership that makes others follow.
Related article: Talking solar power with Canterbury Tech
Martijn: We lean on the side of caution by overestimating things and compensating for that.
Nicolaas: We have to. Now we’re using AI, for example, so there are big questions and we don’t have the information.
Martijn: Even if we’re 100% off, we’re still doing the planet a better service than if we were 50% more accurate. If we push for a fully accurate calculation we’re bowing to people who’ll challenge it anyway.
Nicolaas: In the future I’ll be looking for industry-wide initiatives where we work together to have more of an impact. The political and climate landscape is changing rapidly and business action is the key to good climate action. One thing we are really keen to do is to support more local businesses. That feels good - supporting an eco-system in which we are an active player rather than being dictated by large organisations such as Alphabet, Meta, and AWS. Being with SiteHost is part of that approach.
Thank you so much for your time, and your kind words. Let's not wait another five years before we talk again!