Software
Best Practices for performance
In our Managed Center administration area, you can benefit from numerous best practices from our experience in hosting high-performance online stores and high-traffic applications. With just a few clicks you can either use our presets or configure your clusters individually. Choose the software and tools that fit your needs.
- E-commerce stack - designed for maximum performance
- Monthly centralized update day to update services and software packages
- At least 15 minutes of "remote hands" for individual service or application configuration during our office hours included
Web Server
You want to be flexible in choosing your web server? No problem. With us you can switch between the open-souce solutions Apache and NGINX at any time, but you can also choose profilers according to your requirements as well as set up Varnish caches and much more around your web server.
Apache
Apache is a proven web server with a wide distribution. Many systems therefore already rely on this server out of the box, for which PHP modules, for example, can also be easily and dynamically reloaded. Due to its structure, the web server consumes a lot of resources during large load peaks.
NGINX
NGINX was developed under performance aspects. The web server is based on an asynchronous architecture, so that the resource consumption remains largely constant during load peaks. NGINX can be extended by modules by compiling them into the system - dynamic loading is not possible.
Profiler
Our interface allows you to connect external profilers and analysis tools with just a few clicks to monitor performance and easily identify bottlenecks.
Blackfire
Blackfire analyzes PHP applications to collect data about time, CPU, I/O wait, memory, network calls, HTTP and SQL requests. This data is clearly visualized in various graphs.
Tideways
Tideways is a tool for profiling, monitoring and tracking in PHP. Take advantage of the strengths of Tideways, which lie, for example, in the targeted analysis of known runtime problems with a very clear representation of the timeline.
New Relic
New Relic APM is a monitoring tool that allows you to continuously monitor the performance of your online store in real time. New Relic locates bottlenecks such as long loading times and sends an automated message to you if desired.
Varnish SSL
The use of a Varnish cache brings you two important advantages, especially in the case of large visitor rushes: It reduces content delivery time while saving resources. Moreover, by using it, you can often do without load balancers or complex infrastructures.
SSH
Do you want to insert SSH keys to enable secure login without a password? Or block unwelcome IP addresses? In our Managed Center you can do this quickly and easily with just a few clicks.
Database & Search
To ensure the highest possible speed and quality of search results, powerful search engines and databases must be integrated into your website. Put together your ideal configuration with us at the Managed Center.
MySQL
MySQL is a widely used relational database system. For many CMSs, this system is the technical basis for storing data, because it can process large amounts of data quickly. You can create MySQL in the Managed Center with one click and define users.
The full-text search engine OpenSearch is a fork based on Elasticsearch 7.10. It was initiated by Amazon's AWS and currently has the same range of functions as Elasticsearch. OpenSearch is developed by a large open source community independent of Elasticsearch.
You want a full-text search engine whose scope of services is also relied on by large companies such as Facebook, Netflix, Zalando and also GitHub? Elasticsearch searches articles up to 5 times faster than other search engines, making it a speed-guarantor.
Solr offers you a wide range of search functions and is fault-tolerant and easily scalable. The platform is especially popular for Big Data. Solr not only offers a very detailed functional environment, but also numerous available plug-ins.
Sphinx is a full-text search engine and plays out its advantages especially when implementing your own search engines or web applications for processing large amounts of data. You can either use it to quickly and easily batch index and search stored data, or alternatively index and search the data on the fly, similar to using a database server.
Cache & Queue
No extra charge and already preconfigured:
Redis
Online stores with many visitors generate a large number of shopping carts from which sessions are generated. The sessions can be stored in a Redis database, for example, which can significantly increase the performance of a store. In the Managed Center, a Redis server can be installed, configured and deactivated with just a few clicks. Read more about the performance benefits in our blog series.
RabbitMQ
RabbitMQ is a so-called message broker: code messages sent from one service to another are distributed with its help, so that the messages do not block each other and thus create queues and processes are not executed optimally. If a new user or VHost needs to be created, or access needs to be configured, this can be done quickly and easily in the Managed Center.
Security & Backups
To ensure that you can run your online store or blog as securely as possible, we provide you with extensive and in some cases exclusive security features.
Firewall
To protect your application as efficiently as possible against unauthorized access from the outside, you have the option of individually configuring the firewall via port shares.
Protection
You want to block clients or limit a new client? With just a few clicks, this can be implemented in the Managed Center just as quickly as creating an Allowlist.
ShopSecurity
With ShopSecurity you can check your store installations for known and potential security vulnerabilities. Following a scan, you will receive detailed reports with concrete recommendations for action and recommendations for optimizing the security-relevant settings of your store and server.
Backups
For 14 days, we check daily whether your backups of the file system and all databases have been performed successfully. In addition, we check the backups for consistency and manually restore the backup if we detect an error. In case of data loss files and dumps can be restored through our Managed Center.
Developer tools
To support the workflows of developers in the best possible way, we do not only offer a pure web server and PHP. Rather, we provide a specific selection of tools to optimally support you in routine work, deployment and analysis of the web applications hosted with us.
Cluster Control
Cluster Control" is a so-called command line tool for our clusters. This tool can be built into automated deployment scripts, for example, to simplify configurations across clusters.
Application specific command line tools
n98-magerun2
For Magento 2 users, we provide version n98-magerun2. The feature set is similar to n98-magerun and therefore a good complement to Magento's own bin/magento tool.
sw-cli-tools
You have a Shopware store? For this we provide sw-cli-tools, a command line tool that supports you in installing Shopware and plugins for Shopware.
wp-cli
For WordPress users, our stack includes the wp-cli tool, which allows you to manage WordPress instances from the command line.
General command line tools
Composer
Composer is a package manager for PHP that can be used to install and update most modern PHP applications, as well as Magento 2 and Shopware.
Lessc
With lessc we offer a less compiler for the command line, with which you can compile less code in CSS.
Bower
For frontend JavaScript libraries we provide Bower, a package manager.
Node/NPM
For modern web applications, frontends and developer tools are increasingly built with NodeJS. To simplify the work with it, we provide NodeJS and NPM.
Grunt
You want to automate processes directly on the cluster. With Grunt we provide a task runner for JavaScript.
Git
The version management tool Git is pre-installed on our clusters, not only for technology enthusiasts.
What our employees say
"Consulting" for me means seeing the customer's business through their eyes. My goal is to convey to him that we are aiming for a long-term collaboration to make him even more successful together. Because for more than 10 years, we have been the "right sparring partner" in e-commerce with our technology and innovations.
Achieving success together with our customers and partners is what drives me. And these successes can only be achieved through close coordination between our partners and us. Our team is therefore always approachable - whether for new customers or long-standing partners.
My goal is to advise customers not only professionally, but above all with regard to their individual requirements. They benefit from the many years of experience at maxcluster and the best practices from over 10 years of e-commerce hosting. Because this is how we ensure that stores and applications always run efficiently and economically.
E-commerce hosting is like building a house: If the foundation is not solid and designed for long-term reliability, growth will be on shaky ground. It is therefore very important to me to understand the long-term goals of my customers and to advise them individually in this regard. Transparency and open communication are essential for this.
In the digital age, e-commerce is the most important growth driver for retailers. For over 10 years, maxcluster has been supporting professional companies as a leading partner in e-commerce hosting.
For us, the ideal hosting solution for the store or application is performant, reliable and economical at the same time. And that is also the goal of my consulting, which always keeps the requirements and the success of the customers in mind.
