An Application Private Network (APN) is a private, encrypted network running in parallel with your standard network - essentially a VPN for your application.

This case study showcases La langue française, an online learning platform and publication that teaches people how to speak French. La langue française hosts their Ruby on Rails application on Vultr with the help of Cloud 66.

The e-commerce sector has been growing for the past few years. It was one of a few winners during the pandemic crises, increasing its global market share to 17% in 2020. The worldwide market is predicted to reach $5.7 trillion in 2022, according to the SmartInsights report. As a result of the pandemic, we noticed an increase in small and local retail businesses moving online. Two out of three small businesses now accept online payments (PayPal Canada).

Welcome to the Cloud 66 Changelog. These are the changes that have gone out this month.

Not all colors look good. Let me rephrase: not all colors look good on everything. This is even more applicable when it comes to websites. When put next to each other, it is important for colors to look good, have the right contrast and be readable. Thankfully there are ways to generate such colors - attractive, readable and complementary - using code. I started looking into generating attractive and complementary colors when we were working on a feature involving tags.

We integrate with all the major cloud providers, but some of our customers need to deploy their applications on servers which are physically in their own country or even on their own premises.

There are many ways to add search functionality to a Rails application. While many Rails developers choose to use the native search functionality built into popular databases like MySQL and Postgres, others need more flexible or feature rich search functionality. ElasticSearch is probably the most well known option available but it has its own issues. Firstly, it is a resource hungry beast. To run ElasticSearch properly in production, you need a few beefy servers.

Announcing support for Ubuntu 20.04 on all Cloud 66 products (including registered servers). From this point onward, brand new applications will have Ubuntu 20.04 installed. We will continue to install Ubuntu 18.04 when scaling up servers in an existing application. Don't forget, you can control your target Ubuntu version through your manifest! It has been a while in the building and testing (and dependency pruning), but we are now very pleased to make it public.