The Hostico website has been redesigned!

How it started

Six months ago, when we began to consider the redesign of the Hostico website, we decided to talk to some of our clients and reanalyze all the feedback received in an attempt to identify what is important to you and to improve these aspects.

Decisive Factors

As a result of this process, we have reconfirmed that technical support, service availability, application speed, and response time are the main factors for which we were chosen as a web service provider.
We conducted an overall average based on 167 'reviews' received from you, which resulted in the following score:

• Overall Score: 9.748 out of 10
• Technical Support: 9.838 out of 10
• Availability: 9.724 out of 10
• Response Time: 9.766 out of 10
• Performance: 9.664 out of 10
  
  

Hardware Audit

All accounts are hosted on 1U or 2U rackmount servers, with two Intel Xeon Nehalem or Westmere processors (x16-x24 cores/thresholds), totaling up to ~70,000MHz for a single server. Memory between 16 and 128GB, EEC DDR III, 1333-1600MHz. Connectivity of 2GB/s, DDoS protection through ArborNet of 8GB/s, and a data center with connectivity of 15GB/s.

The only mechanical component present on the servers was the RAID 10 Arrays using SATA III or SAS HDDs. Although the RAID 1+0 configuration (4xHDD/Server) offers redundancy (the information being written simultaneously on multiple HDDs makes data loss impossible during a failure) and speed (reading and writing data occurs simultaneously on multiple HDDs), we identified at certain moments delays due to unoptimized MySQL queries on large databases.

Solution

As a solution to this problem, we decided to add an additional dedicated SSD (Solid-State Drive) RAID Array for MySQL databases on all web hosting servers. The effects were as expected; the information processing speed increased considerably, and the delays caused by unoptimized queries were eliminated.

Audit Software

I initially chose suPHP as the PHP 'handler' for security reasons and because it allows each client to have their own PHP directives. We were aware, at the time of implementation, that the response time and resource consumption caused by suPHP compared to FastCGI are much higher.

Solution

The solution to reduce the response time for PHP was to write an application that automatically adds a private PHP directives file for each generated account, thus giving us the ability to switch to FastCGI, while also reducing the response time of the websites. We also activated eAccelerator (a PHP optimizer and accelerator) on the new SSD RAID Array. The effects were surprising, the processing time of HTTPD connections and the response of the websites decreased significantly.

Why 'Flat Design

I chose the 'flat design' because we appreciate the friendly aesthetics and the slightly forced simplicity of the concept, the simplicity that compels highlighting information based on importance, without the need to exaggerate the components to make them stand out.

The Redesign Process

The redesign was done entirely in-house and took about 3 months, during which we went through multiple design versions. The result is:

• 10,442 lines of CSS code
• 4,761 lines of PHP/HTML code
• 1,371 lines of JQuery code
• 229 images and photos
  
  

We decided from the beginning to completely abandon the existing website and applications and start with a blank slate. This allowed us to design a modern and flexible site, optimized for mobile devices and common browsers.

What follows

The website is fully designed based on variables, which allows us to add support for multiple languages and different themes in the future. We also want to completely rewrite the 'Knowledge Base' and add a suggestion section dedicated to Hostico customers.

We would like to thank our customers for the feedback provided and for being with us!