Superior Technology Stack | How Flexpress Works

Technology stack for blazing-fast websites: how Flexpress works

A peek under the Flexpress hood, for technical leaders needing to optimize the technology stack of their high-traffic websites.

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In a nutshell:

Flexpress Technology Stack

Flexpress is a SaaS platform integrating the various products needed to solve critical high-traffic website business KPIs: site speed; audience and revenue growth; content and engineering ROI.

Via GraphQL API, the Flexpress React/Next.js frontend remains decoupled (“headless”) from the WordPress backend. For engineers, the main benefits being faster and easier development driven by: premium hosting and site monitoring; shared frontend component library to instantly build modern, visual React/Next.js experiences; ultra-secure backend with WordPress editorial interface; integrated monetization and analytics.

Everything in Flexpress drives toward publisher-owned, first-party data stored securely in our clients’ data warehouses to power blazing-fast speed, streamlined API integrations, and AI efficacy.

Technology stack: Essentials

Underlying Technical Components

Flexpress is a frontend React/Next.js project with a GraphQL API connecting to a Django (Postgres) backend deployed on AWS RDS, with Google BigQuery acting as the data warehouse.

We use Docker and Kubernetes (via AWS EKS) for containerization and orchestration, and Celery for running asynchronous tasks. For monitoring, Sentry and Datadog, and we write tests primarily with pytest, Jest, and Selenium.

Premium hosting with seamless backend plugin management
Faster development with React and Next.js frontend library
Backend monitoring and regulatory including GDPR and CCPA

View List: Flexpress API integrations

Technical questions? Contact us.

underlying-technical-components-of-flexpress-tech-stack

Technology stack: Architecture

Blazing-Fast High-Traffic Sites

Overhead view of Flexpress, for engineers

”We like working with Flexpress not only because of its great technology, but also because of its amazing team. This is one of the most client-oriented companies I know.
Denis StebunovFounder, Ivelum

”Flexpress allows us to skip a bunch of steps, and really, really focus on the user. The best part of working on SAVEUR with Flexpress was that we could just focus on the UI, and just focus on the interactions—the little animations here and there that usually get pushed out. With Flexpress, the project took weeks vs. months— we could just focus on the fun stuff.
Greg AllenCEO, First + Third

Technology stack: Collaboration

How Engineers Work with Flexpress

Flexpress’s architecture makes it easier and faster for engineers to build amazing website experiences—all while providing max stability, speed, and security for a site’s content and users.

Engineers working with Flexpress’ technology stack receive access to site-specific repositories in which they can create their preferred frontend and backend changes, including creating special blocks, widgets, and eye-catching designs. Engineers are free to release these new features in accordance with their team’s preferred schedule.

Any domain fully-launched on Flexpress gets a site-specific Github repository for organizing backend and frontend development. In addition, Flexpress specializes in providing enterprise clients with additional backend functionality that provides edit ability across a portfolio of domains (commonly referred to as an “organization” repository).

Requests for changes to the core Flexpress codebase can be submitted at any time. We encourage engineers propose changes as soon as possible, so that we can work together to complete the work and drive optimal success.

Dig deeper: Flexpress API Documentation

More info: Frontend Design Library

Technology Stack: Monitoring

Premium DevOps and Site Monitoring

Flexpress monitors your sites 24/7/265 for maximum uptime, performance, and security

Infrastructure

Flexpress uses AWS Cloudwatch Alarms to monitor critical AWS resources including RDS, Elasticache instances, and SES reputation. Flexpress tracks the following metrics for you:

RDS: CPU usage, IOPS burst balance, free storage space
Elasticache: memory usage, current items number
SES: Reputation, BounceRate, Reputation, ComplaintRate

AWS immediately notifies Flexpress via Slack for investigation if any metric registers outside of the preferred performance threshold.

Availability

Flexpress-hosted sites have more than 99.99999% uptime. We use Pingdom to monitor uptime for all hosted sites, with particular focus on homepages, sitemap pages, and other critical content.

Pingdom sends health checks to Flexpress every minute. If no response is received, Pingdom sends a notification to PagerDuty. PagerDuty notifies Flexpress engineers and product managers via Slack and Flexpress’s 24/7/365 on-call engineering team by phone to ensure prompt investigations.

Application performance

Flexpress uses Datadog for APM and infrastructure monitoring. The Datadog agent is installed on every EC2 host on staging, and on production EKS clusters. The Datadog agent collects the infrastructure data about CPU, memory, and free disk space, for every host. Flexpress monitors 24/7/365 all the following scenarios:

EC2 level:

High CPU usage
Low free disk space
Out-of-memory (OOM) event happened

Application level:

Impressions per ad unit anomaly detected
Impressions per site anomaly detected

Flexpress installs Datadog packages at the code level to track application performance, including database queries, code-level call latency, requests to third-party services, dependencies, and other performance metrics.

Stability

Flexpress uses Sentry to track application errors for hosted sites. Sentry packages are installed on a code level and send error details to the Sentry dashboard. If any error fits the specified alert rules, FlexPress engineers and product managers are notified via Slack for immediate investigation.

Custom tools

Flexpress maintains its own tools to monitor other critical site functionality, including:

Robots.txt changes:
If changes are made to robots.txt files, PagerDuty alert generated.

Failed cron jobs:
Every five minutes, Flexpress tracks failed Kubernetes CronJobs in production and staging clusters.

WordPress Post modified date alerts:
If any WordPress post date was modified programmatically, alert sent immediately to Flexpress engineers via Slack.

Technology stack: Support

Flexpress: available at any time to solve engineering questions

Flexpress commits to helping publishers reduce technology friction with a radical support mindset. We want you to focus on growing your business; let our team tackle backend engineering minutiae. We can help:

Design and implement custom-coded experiences
Benefit from AI-enabled content recirculation and site search
Execute multi-site portfolio migrations to unified platform

”When I acquired SAVEUR in 2023, I chose Flexpress to power our CMS, ads, and commerce. Flexpress' technology stack and top-notch support program allow me to focus on the work I truly love: creating transportive food and travel content for our readers.
Kat CraddockCEO and Editor-in-Chief at Saveur

Flexpress FAQ

What are your server reliability and uptime scores?

Flexpress uses AWS and Fastly as Cloud Web hosting and CDN solutions, both of which promise at least 99.999% uptime scores. Flexpress-hosted sites perform at this rate, as measured by Pingdom.

What security features do you offer?

Flexpress provides security features such as Web Application Firewall, DDOS protection, and Vulnerabilities Scanning. For a full breakdown of Flexpress’s security features, please contact Customer Support at support@flexpressai.com.

Does Flexpress offer SSL certicates?

Yes!

How often does Flexpress face downtime?

Flexpress-hosted sites have more than 99.99999% uptime, with minutes of outages per year (if that) across hundreds of millions of monthly pageviews.

How often does Flexpress back up the database?

Every day.

If the event of an outage, what is your average response time?

Flexpress’s internal alert system allows us to respond immediately in the event of an outage.

How many customers share a single server?

Flexpress uses AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service; customer applications (e.g. sites and related services) thus work in isolated Docker containers.

Is it possible to scale up or down once I'm on Flexpress servers?

Yes, it is possible to scale up or down resources based on client requests. When responding to requests to scale up or down, Flexpress may recommend optimizations that will more effectively address the underlying reason why such a request was made. The Flexpress DevOps team configures the infrastructure to optimize speed, performance, and cost; we hold deep value for site and application performance. Flexpress’s hosting solutions allow for almost infinite scalability in terms of CPU/RAM, traffic, and storage to be able to handle sites of limitless sizes.

Does Flexpress monitor hosted sites for downtime or other potential concerns?

Yes, Flexpress offers 24-hour monitoring, with an alerts ecosystem integrating Pingdom, PagerDuty, Sentry, DataDog, AWS Cloudwatch, and more.

How often do you back up websites?

We do a production database backup every night around 1 a.m. UTC, and all backups are stored in S3.

What do you use for a domain registrar?

Namecheap.

When was the announcement about Flexpress, and CEO Ajay Rayasam?

August 27th we officially launched publicly as Flexpress. Subsequent changes will roll out over time, with our goal being only to serve our customers better.

What is Organic.ly?

Founded as Organic.ly, our team launched publicly as Flexpress on August 27, 2024 because the name Flexpress best reflects our commitment to flexibility at scale, open-source innovation, and blazing-fast site speed that maximizes audience and revenue potential for customers.

Website: Our website is flexpressai.com; that’s where you go if you enter Organic.ly into your browser. If it’s easier to remember going forward, you can also access our site using the URL flexpress.ai.
Emails: You can contact Flexpress using @flexpressai.com email addresses. All emails sent to our @organic.ly addresses will still reach us via our flexpressai.com inbox.
Support: to get support, you can always email support@organic.ly, but please try to use our the support email: support@flexpressai.com.