More and more companies and institutions are opting for fully flexible hosting with our platform-as-a-service (PaaS), Jelastic Cloud. It allows you to choose your technologies in a few clicks with a custom architecture and fully scalable resources.

A crucial overhaul for WWF Belgium’s activities

The WWF website regularly has to respond to massive peaks in traffic during environmental news or disasters. For example, the terrible fires in Australia in 2020 alone generated 80% of the annual traffic. The WWF website must be available at all times to provide information and collect donations for concrete action on the ground.

The site had previously been built using the Silverstripe CMS, whose technology is now obsolete: it could no longer be modified, nor could it evolve. For activities to continue, the website had to be overhauled.

The WWF Belgium team photographed in its natural element

A bespoke project developed by Walking Men in Brussels

Brussels agency Walking Men was chosen to oversee the WWF project from start to finish and to provide the hosting.

From Silverstripe to Drupal 9

The Walking Men team recommended switching to a new CMS, Drupal 9, which is also used by WWF Switzerland. This CMS allows customised interactions with external tools such as CRM and donation management platforms.

In addition to language management, this technology is also ideal for managing numerous content types with dedicated templates and fairly detailed taxonomies. It also ensures a user-friendly content management experience.

Jelastic Cloud: for flexibility and efficiency

For Walking Men’s CTO, Nicolas Glinoer, Jelastic Cloud is more advantageous and flexible than other PaaS.

“The management interface is wonderful and allows you to juggle with all the technologies. With Jelastic Cloud, we were able to build a robust and redundant infrastructure without having to get into the nitty-gritty of the network architecture. This allowed us to focus on our core business in order to bring our full added value to WWF.”

Jelastic Cloud met all the requirements for the WWF Belgium project:

Automatic scalability to respond to peaks

The new site maintains responsiveness, regardless of the number of visitors. Jelastic Cloud automatically deploys a large number of micro instances under load. These additional instances ensure high availability of services. WWF Belgium can now launch its fundraising campaigns in support of the latest disaster in the knowledge that everything will run smoothly.

Cost control with a transparent pay-per-use tariff

There’s no need to opt for very greedy hosting with the risk of not using it to its full potential. Even if the website has to mobilise major resources at certain times, WWF Belgium pays only for those it actually uses. Jelastic Cloud’s pricing is clear and transparent.

Ability to set up an architecture quickly and easily

Jelastic Cloud allowed the development team to deploy, in a few clicks, all the infrastructure needed for the project, such as load balancers, database servers, application servers, caching, backup, etc. This architecture can evolve as often as needed, and there’s no need for a system administrator. Everything is deployed automatically, in a few clicks, via the Jelastic Cloud admin console.

Ability to create on-demand environments

The development team can manage temporary evolutions on the WWF Belgium website or different versions by creating staging environments in a few minutes. Jelastic Cloud is ideal for deploying development, production and test environments, etc. As for the rest, everything is done very easily using the intuitive Jelastic Cloud console.

Why Infomaniak?

The previous host was taken over by a larger one and no longer met the WWF’s ecological criteria. For this complete overhaul, WWF Belgium was looking for a host capable of meeting the technical needs of the project, but also its environmental requirements in a bid to minimise its digital footprint. Criteria such as data centre cooling, energy sources and the power usage effectiveness (PUE) were just as much an issue as the performance and cost of the hosting solution.

“The fact that Infomaniak offers a wide range of solutions that correspond to needs that we are constantly encountering (dedicated managed cloud servers, Jelastic Cloud, very high availability hosting, etc.) allows us to envisage a long-term collaboration. The responsiveness of the hosting company and the experience of the support department are also essential criteria from our point of view.” Nicolas Glinoer, Walking Men CTO

For WWF Belgium, Infomaniak’s ecological approach was a key criterion. Jessica Nibelle, WWF spokesperson:

“Infomaniak’s overall commitment, its excellent PUE figures and its ISO 50001 and 14001 certifications relating to energy and environmental management spoke in its favour, as did the fact that it operates its own data centres. We also liked Infomaniak’s transparency concerning its environmental commitments, as this information is not always easy to obtain.”

Jelastic Cloud: an easy and attractive alternative to AWS or Google Cloud

If you need to deploy a complex architecture

Jelastic Cloud gives SMEs and start-ups easy access to all technologies within their budget. Infomaniak’s PaaS solution is extremely intuitive and frees developers from tasks related to the administration of servers and network architecture.

Fewer and fewer companies, NGOs and institutions are able to spend time and energy deploying and administering a hosting architecture. The realisation of projects must become a top priority again. Jelastic Cloud therefore enables significant cost savings and faster project delivery.

If your site’s subject to traffic fluctuations

Jelastic Cloud is particularly powerful for businesses exposed to high seasonality such as e-commerce, education and events. This solution allows you to ensure the continuous availability of your services by dynamically resizing the resources of your infrastructure according to circumstances. And you only pay for the resources you actually use.

A recognised PaaS that’s constantly evolving

Jelastic Cloud offers high-end services in a package that’s easier to use, more flexible and less expensive than the solutions of the Web giants. Exclusively hosted in Switzerland in our environmentally friendly data centres, this solution ensures the sovereignty of your data and integrates perfectly with Swiss Backup, which automatically backs up your environments to three different media in two data centres.

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