For those whom haven’t heard the big news we recently launched our new Blaze solution which is an all-SSD Cloud VPS and PAYG  Hourly billing offering. With the help of OnApp and Solidfire we have created a great solution with guaranteed performance in mind. However the fun doesn’t stop there. We are continuing to improve and work on this Blaze solution. Working on new improvements, new features, which all help you, our customers!

When working with virtual and cloud based services you generally have one goal in mind and that is to run your application and get it online. Your application could be a website, a Magento shopping cart, your SugarCRM site, or some other open source application. Well what if we could save you some time by having some pre-configured templates ready for you to use! Crucial Cloud Hosting will soon be offering a broad range of templates pre-installed with some of your favorite open source applications, saving you time.

We have teamed up with Jumpbox to provide a broad list of templates which will soon be available on our Blaze SSD Cloud VPS and Blaze PAYG services. In the rest of this blog I will run through some example templates and also explain how this helps you. Jumpbox has a large range of templates available that provide you access to a variety of open source applications. I will run through some categories to give you a bit of a snapshot of what is available.

Blogging

• Drupal CMS
• WordPress

Content Management

• Joomla CMS
• Moodle

eCommerce

• Magento

Database Management

• MySQL 5 (with PHPMyAdmin)
• PostgresSQL

Infrastructure

• Cacti Monitoring
• Nagios Monitoring

Wiki

• MindTouch Wiki
• TikiWiki
• MediaWiki

Ticket Tracking

• Bugzilla

Security

• OpenVPN Networking Platform

How does this help me?

So you may be asking yourself what does all this mean? Basically a customer will have a requirement,  lets say for example a customer requires an SSD Cloud VPS to run their WordPress blog system. The next step would normally go something like this,

1. Order a single Blaze SSD Cloud VPS via the Crucial website.
2. Get welcome email about recently setup Blaze SSD Cloud VPS.
3. Begin configuring / installing software to get WordPress going.
4. Finally get WordPress installed, and start using your default WordPress website.

With our automated provisioning of Cloud VPS orders, this can save you some time, but you, your I.T team, web designer and / or web developer will all need to then go through the setup process to get things operational. This can be time consuming for all involved parties. With the upcoming introduction of the Jumpbox templates, we are helping you reduce the time spent in step 3 to get your Cloud VPS operational and running your wordpress site sooner. The process would now look a bit like this,

1. Order Blaze SSD Cloud VPS via the Crucial website, this time choosing the WordPress Jumpbox template.
2. Get welcome email about recently setup Blaze SSD Cloud VPS.
3. Using the documentation regarding the WordPress Jumbox template, begin using your default WordPress website.

This example can be re-written so many times, simply replacing WordPress with any of the open-source applications on offer. A full list of what open source applications will be offered is still under review, however we will be sure to try and cover the popular choices.

When are you offering these new templates?

Our goal is to have this available within the next few weeks, we will be sure to put out announcements to existing customers, Facebook,  Twitter and any other place we can think of! So keep an eye out. If you have any experience with using the Jumpbox templates we would love to hear from you!