Hosted Power

Belgium-based hosting partner Hosted Power fine-tunes end user infrastructure to guarantee load times of less than one second, alongside maximum uptime. They are the organization behind TurboStack – an innovative platform that supports developers From Code to Cloud, centralizing applications in the Cloud. 

Empowering Developers 

Hosted Power was originally founded as an e-commerce hosting organization, providing managed services around Magento. They were the first certified hosting partner for Shopware in the Benelux, and offered a standardized Odoo-stack long before it became mainstream.

Speed is everything in e-commerce. A matter of seconds makes the difference between a customer choosing to purchase from your site, or moving to a competitor with faster loading times. 

To ensure its end users could offer customers the fastest websites possible, Hosted Power built TurboStack – a combination of interchangeable technologies engineered to make any cloud environment exceptionally performant.

Building on the Command Line 

Hosted Power needed to guarantee end users exceptional speed, automatic scalability to handle peaks, better cost optimization, and 99.99% uptime reliability on TurboStack. They chose to build on UpCloud’s Private Cloud over hyperscalers for fine-grain control over CPUs and data centers, as well as robust infrastructure operations, uptime guarantees, and security.

“There’s good reasons why we chose UpCloud. The personal approach is great for us, as we can discuss the exact CPUs that we want to use to ensure our merchants’ stores are the fastest possible. Thanks to this, we are able to better provide our speed and uptime guarantees” – Tim Terreur, COO, Hosted Power 

UpCloud also suited the engineering mindset of the Hosted Power team, who built TurboStack entirely on the command line. Today, it is used in industries across Europe, from e-commerce to manufacturing, enabling end users to run mission-critical applications whilst unburdening developers from cloud infrastructure management and reducing unexpected costs, so they can focus on their development environment. 

“Small and medium businesses often have fantastic software development in-house, but sometimes lack the budgets to realise everything they want to achieve. Running cloud workloads on hyperscalers is tricky because there is a lack of cost control, which is why we often advise merchants to run on UpCloud with a fixed monthly cost and no outbound traffic fees.”  – Tim Terreur, COO, Hosted Power 

Improved Speed 

Keeping the application and infrastructure layers close, Hosted Power offers a GitLab service for end users, and fully automates development pipelines from development to production, so end users can deploy faster.

The team reports that some websites and applications are up to 100% faster after moving onto UpCloud – enabling Hosted Power to boost app and website performance more than would otherwise be possible, making websites or applications run four times faster on an unchanged budget.

For one major cosmetics retailer, Hosted Power was able to recently increase loading speed 34% by running their site on TurboStack, atop UpCloud. Guidelines recommend websites should aim for a Largest Contentful Paint (the render time of the largest image, text block, or video visible when the user first navigated to the page) of 2.5 second or less. Hosted power decreased LCP from 2.011 seconds down to just 1.334 seconds. 

Leveraging UpCloud has also made TurboStack highly customisable, providing a graphical interface that gives end users control over their cloud environments, including offering global datacentres, as well as public, private, and multi-cloud options. 

“We’re really proud of this offering – we’re one of the few providers that lets end users select their own hosting company, on a platform that combines everything you need to run your managed workflows in the cloud.”  – Tim Terreur, COO, Hosted Power 

Next Steps 

Hosted Power is consistently innovating, including providing node templates, supply chain security offerings, and experimenting with managed object storage options for end users. 

“We want to consistently improve things for our end users, and we’re now able to provide those with custom-written applications a customised TurboStack that is multi-deployable. We even offer an out-of-the-box template for new nodes. We also have a great account manager at UpCloud, and we regularly talk to him about all of our feature requests and are pleased that many have already been put into production.” – Tim Terreur, COO, Hosted Power