Nowadays, there should not be any compromise on scalability and high-availability for e-commerce websites. Visitors are not interested in what cloud hosting you are using or in what way you build the site architecture, they just want to have a positive user-experience while surfing for the products or services. In this interview, Tom DeBello, CEO of Orchid Sun shared their path to achieving high-performing eCommerce site for Highlander Wine that can handle any variable load with the help of Jelastic PaaS on top of eApps infrastructure.
Orchid Sun is a digital marketing agency located in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex area serving clients around the world. They craft custom web solutions with WordPress for organizations and businesses of any size. Their capabilities include:
- Web design and development
- eCommerce integration
- Web hosting and continued maintenance
- Video animation and editing
- Graphic design
What brought you to Jelastic PaaS on eApps?
Our customer is a brick-and-mortar wine and spirits retailer with a growing online presence. Their increasing focus on Internet sales poses the significant challenge of meeting a highly variable demand.
We, and our customer, did not feel comfortable going with the problematic approach of buying a very large server and hoping it was big enough to meet peak usage demands. We were looking for an intelligent and cost-effective solution that would reliably scale the compute resources up to meet demand, and scale them down to lower costs during slow times. We found eApps and Jelastic.
Tell us about the technologies you used for the site
Highlanderwine.com is built with WordPress and WooCommerce, configured as a cluster that can automatically scale vertically and horizontally. It runs on the eApps Platform as a Service (PaaS) powered by Jelastic. Caching and CDN technologies are used to optimize performance.
How is it performing? What kind of load is it handling?
Prior to launch, eApps performed a series of load tests. This proved to be valuable in identifying bottlenecks and areas that could be tuned and optimized. Since going live we have been very pleased with the performance. When a promotion is sent, demand goes through the roof. The cluster can handle many hundreds of logged in shoppers, all placing orders within moments of each other.
How did Orchid Sun and eApps work together on the solutions?
We have extensive experience hosting sites in single server NGINX environments, but the burst-like traffic patterns of this site required that we seek out a scalable solution. Being new to the Jelastic autoscaling platform and how it functions, we knew we needed a strong hosting partner.
The eApps team was there every step of the way during deployment. I worked very closely with their senior technicians, including the eApps CTO, via email, chat, and Zoom to make sure everything went as planned. Any little snag we encountered was solved swiftly by the eApps team. Since our launch the entire eApps technical team has been there when I needed them.
What was your biggest worry about the deployment?
Black Friday of course! We knew that the site was running well for the recurring promotions before the big day but Black Friday is “a whole ‘nother level.” I experienced a very strange feeling of being highly confident and scared to death when the tsunami hit. Needless to say, or you would not be reading this interview, the site was up to the task. Our customer blew out new records for Internet sales during this intense period of promotions.
That’s impressive! Do you have plans to offer this or similar solutions for other customers in the future?
Yes, I definitely look forward to using this scalable solution again. Having the ability to scale up or down automatically at a moment’s notice is terrific.
Looking for a scalable and highly-available WordPress cloud hosting for your e-commerce websites? Give a try to Jelastic PaaS WordPress cluster at eApps or one of the globally available cloud hosting providers.
