E-commerce on MassiveGRID PaaS

Online stores have the most uneven load of any web application: a campaign email, a marketplace feature or a television mention can multiply traffic in minutes and leave again by evening. The e-commerce packages on MassiveGRID PaaS, built on Virtuozzo Application Platform (formerly Jelastic), are shaped for that. PrestaShop and OpenCart install as a PHP application server with a MariaDB node, which vertical auto-scaling grows and shrinks by the cloudlet; Magento standalone adds the search engine Magento 2 requires and optional Redis; the Magento cluster puts PHP nodes behind a load balancer with a MariaDB cluster, Redis and shared storage so that a node failure or a deploy never takes the store offline. Cyclos is the odd one out, a Java platform for community currencies and payment systems.

Each environment comes with a platform subdomain and certificate, and a custom domain with Let's Encrypt takes one add-on. Billing is hourly at $0.003372 per cloudlet-hour ($2.46 per cloudlet-month) with no licence fee, so a store pays for its peak hours at peak size and for its quiet hours at quiet size. The sizing table on each package page shows three configurations and what each costs for a full month.

Catalogue size and traffic decide between Magento standalone and the cluster. A store with a few thousand SKUs and predictable traffic runs well on the standalone package and can be scaled vertically for a sale. A store that cannot afford a maintenance window, or that expects traffic spikes it cannot predict, belongs on the cluster from the start, because moving a live Magento from one topology to the other is a project.

PrestaShop and OpenCart are the economical choices for small and mid-sized catalogues, especially in the EU where PrestaShop's localisation and tax handling are strong. Both run on the same PHP and MariaDB nodes as the CMS packages, so the Starter estimate is the same as a WordPress site's, and both scale horizontally behind the platform's load balancer when needed.

WooCommerce is a WordPress package, not an e-commerce one. Teams that want WooCommerce should start from the WordPress cluster in the CMS category, which carries the Redis cache and MariaDB cluster a busy shop needs, or from the managed HA WooCommerce hosting plan.

Every package page carries a sizing table with three configurations. To price a configuration of your own, or to see what a package costs on a working-hours schedule, use the PaaS pricing calculator.