Platform-as-a-service provider Jumpstarter.io launched in general availability this week on a mission to make it as easy as possible for developers and web agencies to launch a website or project by spinning up a pre-configured server in less than a second.
Based in Stockholm, Sweden, Jumpstarter.io says its background in consulting and providing hosting for web agencies starting in 2008 helped it understand the needs of its current target customers.
“We figured that our hosting solution was good at the time but it wasn’t scalable. We also had talked to a lot of web agencies about their problems, and since we were also a web agency, we knew quite a lot about their daily lives,” Daniel Marklund, Jumpstarter.io founder and chief product officer says. “We started out with what later came to be Jumpstarter back then, and we slowly moved away from the consulting to working full-time with Jumpstarter in the beginning of 2012.”
According to Marklund, he and his team started Jumpstarter with a “pretty good idea of what the future of cloud hosting would look like.”
“People think the cloud is scalable and it’s easy to use, but what the cloud industry has basically done is moved the regular old servers and the way to work with them into virtual environments,” he says. “It makes it easier to start the server on-demand but you still need to configure it yourself and spend a little time and money worrying about security issues and things like that.”
Marklund says Jumpstarter exists “between GoDaddy and Amazon” in that it provides the “benefit of the cloud that Amazon can provide, but with the ease of use that the shared hosting providers offer.”
“The majority of people don’t want to spend time to configure administration we can help them with that and we do that automatically,” he says.
Another aspect of automation central to Jumpstarter’s service is what it calls Peak Protection. Peak Protection brings scalability to Jumpstarter by ensuring that a website or project stays online through a surge in traffic without requiring directions or configuration by the user.
Marklund describes its file system as another unique feature of its platform since it “can be accessed by your project from any hosting server in our cluster.”
Another aspect of Jumpstarter that Marklund emphasizes is the ability to clone “environments in the same amount of time it takes to set them up.”
“You can go to a tutorial page or when you see a code library you want to try out there’s usually a file that you have to download but our goal is to have Jumpstarter buttons instead,” he says. “Github is a great example. It’s been tremendous for the community but it’s more like a library. You store your code there, people can go and read about your code and also make copies of it. We see ourselves as more of a theatre where the code actually comes to life. We hope we can go so far as making every GitHub project available on Jumpstarter, where you can click a button and then you will get set-up with the database and configuration needed to actually see how it looks when it’s running.”
With 8 employees Marklund says Jumpstarter has “been quite heavily invested in engineering and product development up to this point,” after receiving $1.7 million in funding last year.
The team behind Jumpstarter.io (Co-founder Daniel Marklund is bottom left)
Jumpstarter currently has 3,000 around clients using its platform to host blogs, company websites, and application. Marklund expects to sign-up more clients this week during its initial public launch.
“The big mission of the company is to help every developer,” he says. “We are focused on PHP and WordPress to start with but we are adding more languages further down the road.”
For now, Jumpstarter is focused on marketing in Europe, but it plans to move into the US soon. Marklund says the company is planning to raise funds later this year, and is “looking forward to having an investor from the States in that round in order to, in a year from now, go for the American market with more directed marketing and sales efforts.”