Many IT managers are curious about what is "under the hood" with our software and hosting.
We believe in full transparency, so instead of vague descriptions regarding how we build and host our software, this page describes our technology stack in detail. 

Datacenter and Amazon Cloud Servers

Your website's uptime and security is as important to us as it is to you. That is why we use the latest proven technologies from Amazon for running our web applications.
Many federal government agencies are now using Amazon AWS ( https://aws.amazon.com/federal/ ) because of its power, scalability, cost benefits, and improved security.  

Amazon Services We Use

• Route 53 DNS - This is Amazon's DNS service, and it is fantastic. You can use your own Amazon account or your own DNS servers if you wish, and point your domain name at our hosted platform, or you can use Route 53 DNS from Amazon and we can give you administrative rights to manage your DNS on your own. Either way, we now recommend Amazon's Route 53 DNS service for all of our customers for several reasons;
  • Global Redundancy - Amazon's new DNS service uses datacenters from around the world to make your domain more reliable. 
  • Resists Attacks - While nothing can completely stop attacks on websites, The DNS redundancies that Route 53 provides help thwart Distributed Denial Of Service (DDOS) attacks. 
  • Ease of Use - Changes to DNS settings in Route 53 takes just seconds. 
  • Easier Aliasing - With our platform being on AWS, Route 53 makes it easier to point domain names at dynamic resources, such as load balancers. 
• SSL Certificate Manager - This is Amazon's new SSL certificate suite, which you can use to make your website more secure. Now that Amazon is a certificate authority, they have made SSL certificates FREE to setup and use for applications and websites that are hosted on their infrastructure. You read that right - Free SSL certificates for your sites that we host. The future of websites is "SSL Everywhere" according to Google, and we agree with them. All websites will have SSL soon. 
• EC2 - EC2 stands for "Elastic Compute Cloud" and is how Amazon hosts Windows or Linux servers in their cloud.  Our front-end web servers run on EC2, but they are auto-scaled with Elastic Beanstalk. 
• Elastic Beanstalk - This is an auto-scaling system that creates and destroys new EC2 servers as there are spikes and drops in traffic over time. 
• S3 - Simple Storage Service, or "S3" is the storage system behind our platform. We use a high-end version of this storage, known as "Versioned Buckets", which has incremental backups built into it. When you drag an image into a web page, that file is automatically uploaded to S3 behind the scenes. 
• RDS - Relational Database Service, running PostgreSQL. This service eliminates the need to install a server to run PostgreSQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, etc. We are able to create scalable database instances on RDS that our applications store data in. 

Evo.Cloud

Evo.cloud is a complete rewrite of our powerful CMS platform, with many suites and applications that come included without the need for plugins.
The stack listed below is for evo.cloud.

Application Software

• Content Management System (CMS) - www.evo.cloud
• Application Server - Python ( https://www.python.org)
• Application Framework - Django -  ( https://www.djangoproject.com)
• Database Software - PostgreSQL ( http://www.postgresql.org)

Front-End Coding Scripts and Frameworks

• Responsive Framework - ANY
  • Many of our themes are built with the Bootstrap responsive front-end framework (getbootstrap.com)
  • We are moving to CSS Grid themes in 2019. All new site are recommended to be built on our CSS Grid layouts.
• CSS Editing
  • Built-in CSS editor. 
  • Versioning of CSS files.
  • CSS3 with automatic LESS compression
• JavaScript Framework - Use any.

Code Versioning System (CVS)

• Amazon CodeCommit Private Repositories

Servers and Services

• Web Server - nginx
• ​Application Server - Load-balanced and auto-scaling AWS Elastic Beanstalk instances running Python and 64bit Amazon Linux
• Caching - Amazon ElastiCache
• Database - AWS RDS running PostgreSQL
• Storage - Amazon S3
• DNS - Amazon Route53 (we recommend using Amazon's redundant, distributed DNS vs. GoDaddy and other DNS providers).
• SMTP - Mass emails are sent using SendGrid.com's services to improve delivery success and delivery speed for newsletters.