Our Sponsor Spotlight series showcases the people and organizations who are supporting WordCamp Toronto 2015 through financial or in-kind contributions. Learn more about this year’s sponsors.

What is Carbon60?

“To deliver your WordPress web property without fail, Carbon60 provides a white glove level of service to support the entire WordPress development and delivery life-cycle, hosted within our Tier 3 grade Canadian Cloud data centres.

Our WordPress sandbox allows design/development teams to create new WordPress development environments on-demand while an integrated code management service provides a secure place to manage code changes. Sites are then staged for testing using Carbon60’s integrated security and performance testing tools.

Once optimized, site code and content are promoted to our world-class production WordPress delivery platform. This platform combines the strengths of an enterprise cloud computing architecture – optimized to host WordPress source code, plug-ins and content – with a vastly scalable and robust global edge content delivery/security system.

As a result, our WordPress delivery platform delivers content faster and more reliably, making your site highly resilient to both welcome traffic spikes and unwelcome denial-of-service attacks.”

Why WordPress?

“WordPress democratizes the web, meaning there’s no need for bloated web departments on staff. Content people have direct access to publish their content. Our clients use WordPress because of the low barrier to entry, and the large community surrounding it.

WordPress plugins & themes create a diverse landscape so not all wordpress sites look and act the same, and can allow for rapid development without having to reinvent the wheel

Last but not least, the familiar WYSIWYG tools WordPress provides are what makes it the go-to choice when looking for a rock solid content publishing tool with very little barrier to entry.”

Do you have an interesting WordPress story to share?

“While WP does democratize the web, sometimes you just need to ask for help! We have a client who has an ecommerce site which sells thousands of different products. There was a requirement that their navigation menu include every single item them sell! In addition to this, the site is multilingual, so each nav tree of several thousand items needs to be drawn twice. A single page load called the DB approximately 35000 times, each and every load. The funny part was that the webserver load remained minimal, but as you could image, the DB load was through the roof!

The site was constantly underperforming, and the performance was quite low. We were able work with the client to assess the issues, implement aggressive cacheing for all of the db calls, and are continuing to work with the client to enforce some new content rules to bring down the amount of calls to the database in overall.

Some of the solutions are off the shelf, some are custom tailored to the specific site, and we’ll even go so far as to perform code review with your dev team to ensure that you are getting every last bit of performance you need. We at carbon60 aren’t satisfied in just helping you publish your content. We want your site to be fast, stable, and accessible!”

How has WordPress affected you?

“Because c60 is enterprise focused, access to our environments is more strictly controlled than some other hosting providers. For stability purposes, we traditionally do not allow clients access to their own production environments. Part of this stability means that supporting WordPress core and plugin updates, as well as any hurdles you may run into, becomes the responsibility of our support department.

WordPress users are used to the convenience of the one-click upgrade, and while we do not allow this access on our environments, this is the exact type of agility of service we strive to provide. Stability and security are always top of mind – we are there with you each step of the way to walk through the upgrade process until you have approved of the update, ensuring your site stays up and remains stable before and after the updates.

From a hosting/support perspective, WordPress allows us to standardize on a platform for many sites and this allows us to provide reliable, scalable, support procedures and lets us implement proven best-practises for securing and maintaining our clients’ sites. In other words, WordPress is scalable, and standardizing our support model on this platform allows us to scale our support service with it.”

What’s your advice to WordCamp attendees?

“Adding a CDN like Akamai to your existing site is a great way to speed it up, and keep it up during brief outages!

Migrating your WordPress site to a clustered hosting environment is a fantastic way to maintain uptime, and luckily WordPress helps us with the heavy lifting – Session data, by default, is stored on the client side and the DB (and not the local webserver) so adding additional web servers to scale horizontally is fairly trivial. This is a quick and easy way to grow your fault tolerance, and scalability for those high traffic, mission critical websites!”