For the last few months here at WorkHabit we've been busily creating a new kind of hosting platform. We've taken our expertise in scaling, hosting, and managing Drupal web sites and and layered that on top of cloud computing. Our efforts have resulted in an auto-scaling web server cluster built in the cloud. And it's fully managed, from top to bottom, including the OS, the database, Drupal itself, and even your application.

There's no doubt cloud computing is hot right now. With clouds you're able to provision servers instantly, shut them down when you're done with them, and pay only for what you use. There's no capital outlay required. You don't need to build and manage a datacenter. You can have your infrastructure up and running in hours instead of the weeks or months your IT group will take. Since the infrastructure scales automatically, you're not stuck with the inflexible architectures that existing hosting providers use. Getting ready for an event launch? Get Dugg? Our platform will let you handle the traffic, whether it's something you plan for or something completely unexpected. We're completely removing the constraints you have from IT and capital expenses.

So what's the big deal? Amazon's got a cloud platform -- can't you just build it yourself? You can, but cloud computing isn't about just tossing your app into the cloud and magically scaling it. You'd need to design and build a cluster complete with load balancers, database replication, multiple web servers, file storage, and backup. You'd need to write the code that allows all of this to flex along with traffic and do it seamlessly. Doing it yourself also means you'll need to tune and optimize your environment for scale -- your database, Drupal, and your own code.

That all means that to build your app in the cloud you have to create a highly available large scale cluster. Doing that requires expertise in web app scaling, performance, and management of large web clusters.

We took everything we know about scaling Drupal and built it into a turn-key cluster called Elastic2 that's pre-tuned to run Drupal. Simply place your Drupal app on the cluster and you'll be able to run and scale your site. We continually monitor your servers and traffic and automatically add capacity to the cluster as needed. When the traffic subsides, your clusters contract. Serve billions of page views, and only pay for what you actually need.

We're providing fully managed services along with the cluster. The managed services cover not just our cluster, but also Drupal itself, and even your application code. Support is available around the clock by phone, from Drupal experts, with SLAs that enforce our response times and provides for 100% uptime of your infrastructure.

Let us worry about keeping your servers online and growing capacity. You can focus on building your business.

YourSphere is an early customer using Elastic2. Their Director of Technology Chad Jones says, "I built our site on the Elastic2 platform, so that I can focus 100% on scaling up my business, and not on building and managing infrastructure and servers. Elastic2 has provided my organization with the ability to scale. WorkHabit has been responsive, insanely knowledgeable, and a great partner every step of the way."

We're opening up the beta to additional customers. Contact us if you're interested. We'd love to hear from you.