New generation Java and PHP cloud hosting platform Jelastic Inc. has introduced a revolutionary pricing model. The new model is designed explicitly for production applications and extensive scaling. It also offers great discounts for reserved resources and volume usage.

"Fair pricing is vital to make any business sustainable yet cost-effective for customers," says Ruslan Synytsky, CEO, Jelastic, "Last year we became the first PaaS to launch vertical scaling of servers and true utility-based pricing. With our latest release, we are adding the ability to set both minimum and maximum scaling limits, get volume discounts, and immediately see the projected costs the moment you create or change Jelastic environments. With these changes, Jelastic moves even further ahead of its competition, and becomes extremely cost-effective for small- and large-scale production deployments alike."

The new model contrasts sharply with conventional industry pricing practices. Developers will find it more attractive than existing models for a number of reasons:

Free is never free: Many supposedly competitive cloud hosting vendors attract developers by making it easy to run new apps for free. But as apps start growing, they need more and more resources. And those additional resources are far from free. In fact, at that point the formerly "free" pricing usually becomes very expensive as pricing is rarely adapted to large scale production use.

With Jelastic, automatic volume discounts provide make scaling cheaper: Jelastic can give automatic discounts for usage depending on the amount of resources that the application consumes. So unlike with the "free to start, expensive to scale" platforms, higher-volume usage is automatically cheaper. Larger applications with higher resource consumption and commitment levels automatically get a lower price, making Jelastic perfect for large-scale production use.

Per-machine pricing is bad for customers: The computer-based (per-machine) pricing model commonly used in the industry today means that customers often have to overpay, choosing bigger machines than they actually need because they have no other option.

With Jelastic, the only true consumption-based PaaS, customers only pay for the resources they need: Jelastic is the only Platform-as-a-Service on the market today that has built-in automated vertical scaling. This means customers do not have to guess the machine size they need. Unlike with per-machine or other models, they can let Jelastic add memory, CPU and disk space on the fly. And they pay only for their actual hourly consumption.

Jelastic customers can now set lower and upper limits, to get the best price for their usage patterns: Beginning with Version 1.9, Jelastic lets customers specify the lower and higher scaling limits for all the servers they use within the platform. The higher customers set their minimum resource-use level, the bigger discount they get. At the same time, the maximum level still allows for overage in case the application needs to scale up to serve increased usage. This lets customers set limits that optimize price and operational efficiency.

Jelastic provides cost projections each time the customer creates a new environment or makes changes: Any time a customer changes its configurations, Jelastic immediately displays both the minimum and the maximum expected monthly bill. This makes the pricing both fair and predictable.

"Our app and site (pixmixapp.com) have been powered by Jelastic for some months now," says the founder of popular mobile photo-sharing and private albums application - PixMix, Itamar Einav. "Recently, PixMix has grown rapidly due to a new simplified album creation process. Users can now capture moments with their default device camera, and PixMix will seamlessly identify the events and enable one click private sharing. This increased the number of photos and traffic used in the server exponentially." 

"What made this development extra sweet is that we did not have to change anything in our server," says Itamar Einav. "Jelastic´s auto scaling worked like a charm and handled the heavy traffic. In addition, with the recent payment model, we adjusted the reserved instances, so now we even pay less with more traffic! Combining the competitive pricing and auto-scaling enables PixMix to bring added value to its users and the growing demand all with competitive costs."

Developers who want to see how Jelastic´s new pricing model works can go to http://jelastic.com, sign up for a free trial, and get exact estimates on pricing, even while hosting their apps during the trial.

Jelastic is also unique because it does not require any application code changes. Developers can simply upload their Java or PHP package or specify connection to their SVN/GIT code repository, and get their application running in the cloud in a few minutes. There is no lock-in, and they can choose from multiple independent hosting providers around the world. Jelastic is hosted in the US with ServInt; in Russia with Rusonyx; in Germany with dogado; in the UK and Ireland with Layershift; in Japan with Tsukaeru; in Brazil with Websolute; in Sweden with Elastx; and in Finland with Planeetta.