Over the last few months we have been working with Rackspace, who manages all of our servers, to setup some new servers for us.  These new servers provide us with increased capacity, increased performance and more control over the hosting environment.  Over the last few weeks we started moving some of our customers from the old environment to the new environment and we're already starting to see some performance improvements.  Things just run faster. 

We expect to be finished moving all of our clients from the old environment to the new environment by the end of May.  There won't be any downtime during the migration.  For most customers we don't need to coordinate anything during the move, but for a few we do. For those ones we will be working with them to schedule a specific time to do the migration.

So what do the new servers mean for Aptuitiv Studio?

For one we have more control over the whole environment.  In the past we have used Plesk by Parallels but have felt limited in what we could do.  We need more control over setting up accounts, provisioning and what-not.  We also need to automate the process of creating new customer accounts and that can now happen.

Below are some of the things that we're planning on doing in the near future with the new environment.

• Enable new customers to completely signup for a new account with Aptuitiv Studio without needing us to manually setup their hosting environment.
• Create a partner portal where our partners can create new accounts for their clients without needing us to get involved.
• Integrate hosting information into Aptuitiv Studio to show how much disk space and bandwidth is being used for that domain and allow clients to upgrade/downgrade their account if they need to.

Taking Plesk out of the picture does mean that some of the advanced tasks (such as creating new databases) can no longer be done by our clients. However, a majority of our clients don't do those types of things and we're more than happy to do it for them.

All in all we're really excited about the new environment and the new opportunities that it brings to Aptuitiv Studio.  It's just another step that we're taking to build a better website content management system.