Grégoire Fournel, CTO @ Factomos, pitches his startup and tells about his customer experience with Clever Cloud. Challenges, improvements, migration…
Sidenote: You’ve certainly noticed the blurryness of the cover above: We couldn’t find a hi-res pic of Gregoire. But that’s no problem, with or without it, well… we’re still posting. Sorry, and have a good reading.
Hello Grégoire,
Hello,
Can you pitch us Factomos?
Factomos is an invoicing SaaS for freelances, small and medium-sized businesses. It allows them to manage quotes and invoices and to follow-up payments. We’ve also added banking flows integration for really simple bank reconciliation. We also offer a paperless cloud for all accounting files. The entrepreneur can grant access to his accountant who will be able to download data formatted for the most-used accounting softwares on the market. It’s a monthly fee starting at € 5.00 per month.
Concerning the hosting part, what are your main challenges? Can you share some metrics with us to give us an idea?
The biggest challenge is scalability because we are experiencing a big growth and, for the moment, we are only on the francophone market. We plan to go international in 2017. Moreover, we have just signed two partnerships with major finance players: Agiris and La Poste to distribute Factomos in white label. the second challenge is availability. the minor interruption is critical for us. the third one is deployment ease. It allows us to remain agile in our developments. With Clever Cloud, these three points are simply and automatically managed. We don’t need a system administrator to manage servers, it keeps us focused on our real job : product development, Factomos improvement.
How did you discover Clever Cloud?
We first heard of Clever Cloud on the Internet through different publications and then, a teammate advised us to test Clever Cloud when we were thinking about switching to PaaS.
When did you start using it and what do you think?
We started using the service in December 2014 et and we are pretty much satisfied of this service which, within two years, very much improved. We experienced rare issues when new versions of PHP containers were deployed but, overall we proudly display an availability between 99.8 and 99.9 %.
Did you save money or improve performances in comparison to your previous hosting provider?
On one hand, we didn’t saved much money in comparison with dedicated servers. On the other hand, we really improved in terms of availability, flexibility and we have more time to focus on development, not on server management and backups…
Was it simple to switch hosting provider?
Switching from dedicated hosting to the Clever Cloud PaaS took us two weeks in total. The necessary time to edit source code and tests before definitive migration. Then, the migration had been really simple.
What do you most like on Clever Cloud?
What I like most is the ease in deploying new instances without having to manage them, all this through a very simple interface.
What features are you expecting the most?
What we are waiting the most can be wrap up in three main points : First, database add-ons auto-scaling (just like on instances). Second, deeper reporting on performance, charge and availability of the instances and add-ons. Third, scheduling scalers through the web interface. For example, I schedule a switch to a smaller instance at night because traffic is low, and to a bigger instance during a CRON execution. Same thing for big campaigns. This could be combined with auto-scaling.
How would you describe Clever Cloud to someone who doesn’t use it yet?
Clever Cloud is a PaaS to host your app without worrying about server management or scalability and which lets you focus on product development.