Jelastic, Inc., today announced the launch of a major new version of its ultra-scalable and interoperable Java and PHP cloud hosting platform. The new version, Jelastic 1.9, features a flexible new pricing model, FTP support, caching in NGINX and the latest versions of software stacks (including TomEE and MariaDB 10.0.0).

Version 1.9 builds on the formidable strengths of the globally available and widely recognized Jelastic PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) platform. The platform, initially launched in October 2011, has more than 40,000 users, and is being offered by hosting partners in the United States, UK, Brazil, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Russia and Japan. It has won the highest Java prize, the Duke’s Choice Award from Oracle, due to its fundamentally new approach to cloud hosting of Java applications.

While other platforms impose limitations on developers by forcing them to code to specific APIs and adapt their applications to various constraints, Jelastic maximizes convenience for its users. Uploading and deploying an app on Jelastic takes only a few minutes, since the platform is standards-based and can run virtually any Java or PHP application without any code changes.

Moreover, Jelastic can automatically scale any application. As soon as an application’s load grows, the platform simply makes additional resources available to it. When the load goes down again, the platform reduces the resources.

“Today Jelastic is introducing a significant update with a revolutionary pricing model which was explicitly designed for production applications and for large scaling,” said Jelastic CEO Ruslan Synytsky. “We have added major discounts for reserved resources, as well as discounts for volume usage. These discounts allow developers to host their production apps at a reasonable price. We have also added support of new software stacks such as TomEE 1.5 and MariaDB 10. These projects are extremely innovative, and Jelastic is the only PaaS to drive these kinds of innovations to the community. And we allow developers to test these great products in just a few clicks.”

The newly launched Jelastic 1.9 offers the following useful new features and improvements for Java and PHP developers:

• Volume discounts with reserved and dynamic resources: Jelastic’s automatic vertical scaling provides an application with exactly the amount of RAM and CPU it needs, and reclaims those resources when the application no longer needs them. This allows Jelastic to offer a revolutionary pricing model in which users only pay for what they use. With the introduction of Jelastic 1.9, developers can now choose the reserved and autoscaling limits for their applications and get the corresponding volume discounts in return. The higher the resource consumption is, the lower base price the customer gets. This is ideal for large-scale applications and production use.

• Easier access to application files with FTP/FTPS: The new version of the platform offers support for the FTP/FTPS protocol. This provides a fast, easy, and reliable way of file sharing and data transfer to and from servers in Jelastic environments.

• Higher performance through file caching: Jelastic 1.9 supports caching in NGINX (for both NGINX-balancer and NGINX PHP server). This improves performance by reducing the access time to the resource and increasing the resource building speed.

• More enterprise-ready servers with built-in TomEE: The new version adds Apache TomEE, the enterprise edition of Apache Tomcat, to meet demand for a more enterprise-ready server. This provides application developers with the best technology stack that can be deployed to a simple Java EE container. TomEE is a full-blown app server, but retains the simplicity of Tomcat and avoids architectural overhead.

• More databases with MariaDB 10.0: Jelastic 1.9 is the first PaaS offering MariaDB 10.0, the most advanced database in the SQL world. This database offers developers the advantages of multi-source replication, dynamic columns, and MariaDB Galera Cluster. It is even faster and more fault tolerant, and has more flexible database replication, than previous MariaDB versions.

To learn how Jelastic is making deploying Java applications easy, please visit http://jelastic.com.