Patent ID: 8370195

Claim:
A method for providing an e-commerce hosting service comprising: operating a hosting system providing shared computing resources to a plurality of instances of an e-commerce application, wherein each instance has a corresponding business logic and a corresponding graphical user interface; providing remote access to a design tool for modifying the business logic and the graphical user interface corresponding to one of the plurality of instances, wherein the design tool comprises a graphical user interface, and wherein the graphical user interface of the design tool enables the modification of the business logic of at least one of the plurality of instances of the e-commerce application by the dragging and dropping of modularized sequences of software code into business logic pipelines; monitoring the demand for the shared computing resources of the plurality of instances of the e-commerce application; and reallocating at least a portion of the shared computing resources among the plurality of instances of the e-commerce application in response to detecting a change in demand.