As horrific as it may sound, a lot of our loyal high-volume e-commerce customers were once suddenly dropped by Shopify. For a business with thousands, or even tens of thousands of customers and millions in sales volume, this can be a gut-wrenching experience.
One of the site we have is making over 5 million dollars a year and one day they just closed down the site and no reason is explained.
The Baskets Group
In quick-recovery, many turn to aMiSTACX on AWS. Why? Well, aMiSTACX offers DIY turnkey Open Source Stacks for Ubuntu, Magento, WordPress, and Laravel.
Our stack deployment for Magento Open Source is a high-performance and high-availability turnkey deployment ready-to-go in less than 30 minutes. We also include our A51 Monitoring & Control Dashboard that is designed to manage large-scale AWS infrastructure without complication.
Our backbone is world-class AWS infrastructure, and AWS offers many regions of operation.
For example, if your want or need to, you can park your vape business in India, and block all US traffic from Cloudflare. [Sure, no problem with proxy wars all around the globe sending billions of dollars in slush funds, but heaven forbid a small company runs a vape business, and suddenly you are enemy #1. We understand!]
As such, many times large hosting companies, such as Shopify, use payment processing as a weapon of mass destruction. Pull the plug on payment processing, and it is almost the same as pulling your hosting. [Anyone want to share your warm PayPal experiences?]
Although times may change, AWS has been more liberal in approach, and you can build an e-commerce powerhouse outside of the EU and USA, and enjoy some sense of freedom. Ahhh the days when the Internet was fresh and free… without Big Brother breathing down your neck.
Planning for Continuity
Plan in advance, and start a backup footprint on AWS with aMiSTACX. Maybe tip your toe with your development infrastructure on AWS, or go all-in, and develop a hot-site for emergency continuity.
Tip $: If you keep your hot-site powered down, you can keep hosting costs to a minimum. For a company that does $$ millions in vol, this is peanuts, and a necessary business expense.
Our Recommendations…
For e-commerce, go with our S3 Titanium stack for Magento Open Source. This stack is a 3-tier design, and can scale horizontal and vertical. It is also designed to cache just about everything, so you can run really high-vol with a minimum footprint.
For management, make sure you register for A51, and become comfortable in usage. Set up your development team, and set up a siloed secured RDP development server.
For payment services, maybe you can leverage Amazon Pay, but better not to put all your eggs in one basket. [Psst. aMiSTACX might be able to help you with a crypto payment gateway and gift card processing solution, but you’ll need to reach out to human support for more info.]
Practice for Disaster Recovery
Personally, I worked for many top corporate financial companies, and we used to routinely practice for business continuity. This would include off-site and hot-site prep. You and your DevOps team should do the same.
You can easy make use of subdomains or non-public domains with host files, and/or restrict traffic from the public with Cloudflare WAF, and practice emergency cut-overs and backup restores. In this way, you can develop a checklist to follow, and know the amount of time it will take to restore 100% functionality.
aMiSTACX, a Safe Port from the Storm
Actually, many of our customers ended up enjoying the huge cost reduction, and sense of freedom. Many would not ever go back to Big Brother hosting again, and the learning experience opened their eyes on how to become more resilient to global events, and also to become more experienced with contingency planning and operation.
The Mission Impossible Team.
If you need to set everything up in a rush, then reach our to our DevOps & Development Services, and we will send in our MI Team.
Not only were there an extensive amount of resources available on aMistacx’s end, but they absolutely saved my ass and were able to do some serious major lifting.” Kel
~Lead_Robot