Today, Webslice Serverless is coming out of beta and launching worldwide! This is a massive milestone for us, one which we are incredibly proud to have reached after years of hard work. More than that, it’s a unique and important addition to the hosting platforms available to web developers.
You can get started on Webslice Serverless right now. Your first site could be up and running in a few minutes. To help out, we’ll match the first $5 that you add to your account.
What Webslice Serverless is
Webslice Serverless is a web hosting platform that combines our developer-friendly approach to hosting with serverless infrastructure.
By developer-friendly, we mean features like connecting your hosting environment to Github, GitLab or Bitbucket. Build and release script support. Super-quick and easy ways to manage CDN settings, install SSL, or change PHP versions. Things that make you faster and better at your job.
All of this is useful, but perhaps not revolutionary.
So now comes the really cool bit.
With serverless infrastructure comes full elasticity and usage-based billing. Through horizontal scaling, Webslice Serverless lets you serve your first, hundredth, and thousandth visitor at the same snappy speed—even if they all arrive at the same time. You set the limits, then Webslive Serverless scales within them to whatever traffic you’re receiving right now.
This lets you pay only for what you use. There’s a small monthly fee per website and database, then you pay your actual usage costs. That’s it. Compared to scoping out a VPS or other package that charges you for your full resource allocation all month or year, this can be a much more efficient way to go.
Some very impressive pricing examples
We’re confident that Webslice Serverless will deliver some very pleasant surprises to billpayers around the world. This comes from our own experience during the beta period.
In one month, the Statamic website that you’re reading right now received 70,000 requests in a month, and ran up a total hosting bill of $3.75.
A WordPress site that received 187,200 requests cost only $9.00 to host.
Best of all, the static Astro site that we use for documentation saw 97,500 requests and a hosting bill of $1.22. Less than two dollars!
You don’t need us to tell you that these are tiny prices. Now that Webslice Serverless is publicly available, we’re looking forward to sending very small bills to more and more customers.
This is the start line
Today is day one for Webslice Serverless. By comparison, Webslice Containers turned nine this year and are still going strong. We’re committed to improving both platforms for many years into the future.
We have plans for the future of Webslice Serverless, of course, but we have learned from experience that feedback from users is one of the best sources of information and ideas. So we will watch and listen carefully as your serverless projects go live and thrive on our platform.
And if you have anything you think we should know, we’ll always want to hear from you.
Elastic hosting + utility billing. How hard can it be?
Finally, let’s acknowledge years of hard work from the Webslice team. We first talked publicly about this project at a 2019 WordCamp. It’s been a long road from here to there—one that we believe we’ve travelled alone.
Especially in the early days of this project, we weren’t the only hosting company in the world to be looking into event-driven architecture. But (as far as we know) we were the only one that aimed to bring PHP developers all the way into the serverless future without compromises. The vision that we laid out to the WordPress community included simple site deployments, no plugin-related roadblocks, and no insistence on rendering static sites.
Perhaps we didn’t realise that it was going to take so many years to achieve these goals. Perhaps other hosts would be pleased that they didn’t set their sights so high. Not us. We’re proud to say that today, Webslice Serverless finally brings the promises of serverless hosting to web developers without massive learning curves or compromises on the way that you work.
Over to you
Now we look to developers like you to get to know Webslice Serverless and put it through its paces. Let’s see how far truly scalable hosting can take you.