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Case Studies > Case Study: How Portworx Enabled MightWeb to Increase Revenue by Offering a Containeras-a-Service Platform

Case Study: How Portworx Enabled MightWeb to Increase Revenue by Offering a Containeras-a-Service Platform

Technology Category

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Private Cloud
Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms

Applicable Industries

Telecommunications

Applicable Functions

Discrete Manufacturing
Product Research & Development

Use Cases

Inventory Management
Predictive Maintenance
Track & Trace of Assets

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
System Integration

The Challenge

MightWeb, a hosting company, needed to instantly scale to meet customer demand, which was challenging for the many stateful services they offer like WordPress, MySQL, MongoDB, Magento, and WooCommerce. Most persistent storage options for containers don’t provide both high performance storage for applications like MySQL, and multi-writer shared volumes for WordPress, both hard requirements for typical hosting customers. They needed a solution that could provide high availability, the ability to take snapshots, and the ability to scale.

About The Customer

MightWeb is a one-stop shop for hosting needs. They offer everything from shared web hosting, to virtual private servers (virtual machines), and even dedicated servers. As they’ve watched a big part of the industry move to containers, they’ve recently decided to add a container offering to their platform as well. They see their container offering as the perfect service for people who are outgrowing a shared server but don’t want to manage an operating system in a VM. With a container-based platform, the customer can simply stand up a WordPress container or a Magento container, or any other popular web application, and have their website up and running and instantly load-balanced, replicated, and scalable, without any machine or operating system management overhead.

The Solution

MightWeb uses ComputeStacks, which is a container platform specifically designed for service providers like them. ComputeStacks is a scheduler, like Kubernetes is a scheduler. At the very end of the line is Docker running on servers, but everything from what the user interacts with all the way down to the actual Docker container is ComputeStacks. And ComputeStacks has different modules as add-ons. They use the Portworx module for persistent storage. When they evaluated storage options for their container platform, they basically had three choices. They could go with local disks, they could go with a shared NAS, or they could go with something like Portworx. They chose Portworx because it was the only solution that could provide high availability, the ability to take snapshots, and the ability to scale.

Operational Impact

Portworx enabled MightWeb to increase revenue by offering a container-as-a-service platform for popular stateful web applications like WordPress.
Portworx helped MightWeb increase margins by raising the number of websites that can run on a single host.
Portworx increased MightWeb’s operational efficiency by automatically handling common failures that occur in a dynamic server environment like server failures and network partitions, resulting in MightWeb’s customers getting a scalable website without having to manage any infrastructure or operating systems.