How does Aiir serve customer websites?
We're occasionaly asked if we can do something technical for a customer, like upload a file to our web server, or change something in the ".htaccess" file.
We don't use a traditional web server at Aiir for customer websites, so these things are usually not possible.
We've built a way of serving our websites that makes them highly scalable, and easier for us to maintain.
- We use AWS for all the tech behind our web services.
- We don't use web servers, at least in the traditional sense i.e. ones we can see, access and maintain. Webpage requests don't use Amazon EC2s.
- We primarily use AWS Lambda to power webpage requests, also known as serverless functions. We have no visibility of what actual underlying server is serving a webpage request.
- We use a single codebase, in a single Lambda function. There isn't a separate codebase for each customer - every website runs through one system.
- Nobody can FTP in - you or us. FTP doesn't exist for Lambda. There's no single server to upload anything to.
- You can't upload files to a specific URL. There's no folder structure where you can place a file and expect to see it on a website. Everything has to be managed through our CMS.
- There's no .htaccess file or similar. There isn't an Apache server, Nginx, etc.
- Scaling up and down is not an issue. We don't have to replicate servers when we have higher traffic. Lambda takes care of scaling automatically.
- We primarily store data in the Europe (Ireland) region.