You don’t need to be an IT nerd to start and manage a website – at least not when using IBM Bluemix. Bluemix takes the worry out of setting up a website. It’s a lot of work configuring a web server, opening network ports and dealing with your home Internet’s upload speed. It’s also most likely against the conditions of your Internet Service Provider to allow hosting at any of their residential plans. Bluemix can host your website though.
Disclaimer: I work/worked for IBM. This is an introductory piece I've written for it to promote it. These views are all my own.
Bluemix is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) system which takes away having to setup hardware and software infrastructure and leaves you, the user, to only deal with minimal configuration like how much memory is wanted.
The WordPress Boilerplate
IBM Bluemix offers instantly deployable ‘boilerplates’ such as WordPress, an open source content management system (CMS) popular with bloggers and even most businesses. With this ‘boilerplate’, you won’t need to know or write a single line of programming code – it will setup the entire website for you!
WordPress offers themes, plugins and templates to transform your site to meet your every need. For more information about this, visit the WordPress documentation on Bluemix. Bluemix can also run Drupal and other popular CMS systems like Ghost and PencilBlue. Bluemix can also host many other types of websites built using Java, Ruby, PHP and more.
Enhance your website using Bluemix services
WordPress binds directly with many services offered on Bluemix. Coupled with it is IBM’s fast persistent ‘Object Storage’ and email notifications provided by SendGrid which removes the complexity of maintaining email systems. Other services provided by Bluemix which you can bind to your website include:
- Monitoring and Analytics (FREE): Check the availability of your application and its response times. When designing a Java application, it can log application errors, find the root cause error in your code and monitor performance.
- Auto-Scaling (FREE): Set policies to increase your application’s instances and memory utilisation when it exceeds or falls below certain thresholds. Important when you go viral. It also monitors CPU and memory utilisation on a nice graph.
- New Relic (FREE): All-in-one web app performance tool to evaluate end user experience down to the line of code. Monitor your website, get notified of downtimes and generate reports based on SLAs, availability and scalability.
- BlazeMeter (FREE) and Load Impact (FREE): Self-service enterprise grade performance load testing from all over the world. Monitor how your website (and code) will perform when there are over 250 concurrent users at once.
- AppScan Dynamic Analyzer: Tests your application for security issues to help keep them secure. Provides a thorough report when finished containing all issues found and recommended fixes and advisories to protect your site.
Its practically free! FREE!
Best of all WordPress could be running for free! With 375 GB-hours free hosting coupled with a free ClearDB MySQL database, unlimited IBM Object Storage hosted on SoftLayer and 25,000 email credits a month from SendGrid, you won’t have to pay for a thing!
If WordPress isn’t to your liking though, Bluemix can similarly offer websites made using either Java, Go, Node.js, Ruby Sinatra or Ruby on Rails for 375GB-hours free as well! Pair these up with Bluemix’s wide selection of databases including NoSQL databases to improve your website’s capabilities.
Go even further
If the website ever does get serious, you can buy and add your personalised website domain name to Bluemix like http://blog.italian.recipes (you can actually get that). Conversely continue integrating even more powerful services from Bluemix to add those final building blocks to your incredible website.
Conclusion
You can be amazed at the growing capabilities of technology. Websites are no longer limited to savvy individuals as technology has made it easier than ever for small businesses and individuals to create their own. Thanks to Bluemix and WordPress, with very little effort anyone can represent themselves to the digital world.
