FAQs

Q: How much does aMiSTACX cost?

A: Costs are separated. aMiSTACX Costs / AWS Hosting Costs. You can find the stack pricing per hour under “Pricing” in the AWS Marketplace listing. Our prices are on a per hour rate. Note, you can reduce the AWS side of hosting costs with AWS reserved pricing.

Tip! Use our calculator from the deployment package page to get an approximate cost per month. Look for the “$” button.

Sizing: For Magento, an aMiSTACX S3 Titanium running on a t3-xlarge is good for about 100 unique visitors per every 15 minutes at about 20% load without heavy optimization. [The same stack has also been used to handle catalogs of up to 1 million items, and 500K images. See our case studies for more info.]

Q: Do you offer free deployments?

A : No. If you are looking for Free AWS Marketplace, you can try a vendor like Bitnami.

Q: Do I have to pay a monthly subscription?

A: No. All of our AWS stacks are pay-as-you-go, and are billed per hour of use [starting as little as $0.030 per hour]. Amazon AWS handles all of the secure hosting billing with you directly.

This means when you stop the stack, you are no longer billed for aMiSTACX services; however, you will continue to incur charges for AWS services that you have subscribed to. This type of hosting plan is awesome for use during development when extra servers are required, or when you need extra server horsepower during peak traffic or during big sales. Traditional hosting companies charge per month, and usually you only get one server per hosting plan. Another reason to migrate to aMiSTACX – no more sneaky monthly renewal charges.

Q: Do you offer refunds?

A: No. All of our stacks are rated per hour, and start as little as 0.03 cents per hour. This gives you plenty of time to test, stop and/or delete any mistaken deployments. Additionally, all the pricing information is posted on AWS Marketplace. Should you have any questions it is common sense to ask them before deployments. AWS hosting charges are separate from aMiSTACX services.

Q: What is AWS Free-Tier, and how does it apply?

A: AWS Free-Tier applies to AWS hosting services with Amazon AWS. It is 100% separate from aMiSTACX services. Under certain conditions, the hosting portion of AWS may fall under their Free-Tier services; however, this does NOT apply to aMiSTACX charges as they are separate. Please review the AWS Free-Tier policy for more information.

Q: How is licensing handled?

A: Designated CMS, applications, server OS, and development applications generally fall under Open-Source Licensing. All license files can be found in default application locations, and you can reach out to the software authors for specific up-to-date license information prior to stack deployment. We also have a partial list of 3rd party software vendors on our privacy policy page.

Q: Do you offer development services?

A: Yes! We offer professional development services for WordPress and Magento as long as the development takes place on our stack. The code is yours, but we want to make sure we are developing on a standardized and approved platform. This saves time and cost for everyone.

Q: Do you sell or offer for sale any modules, plugins, software or applications?

A: No. If you see any aMiSTACX module offered for free, or for sale on any third party site that claims to be aMiSTACX, or a misspelling of our name, please contact support.

Our aMiSTACX deployments on AWS Marketplace include our A51 Monitoring & Control Dashboard, specific aMiSTACX modules assigned to designated stacks, bundled deployment expertise, and deployment support.

Q: Do you offer support for the aMiSTACX AWS Marketplace stacks?

A: Yes!

Q: Can you help with deployment?

A: Yes! No charge on a fresh clean deployment should you get stuck. Make sure you review the stack deployment guide.

Q: Is my code and data on your stack mine?

A: Of course! You can migrate your code and data off of a stack at any time, and just stop your subscription.

Q: Can I develop anything on these stacks?

A: Yes! Let your imagination run wild. We only offer Open-Source CMS and apps, and you are bound by their licenses.

Q: Do you support other distros besides Ubuntu?

A: No Centos or RHEL. We favor Ubuntu because it offers LTS [Long Term Support], and is well established within AWS.

Q: Are all EC2 classes available for deployments?

A: No. Only classes designated in the AWS Marketplace listing are available for deployment.

Q: Are all RDS classes available for deployments?

A: No and Yes. RDS deployments via CFT packages will have a limited selection; however, post deployment, you may change the RDS class to anything you want. The reason for this is not to overwhelm our customers during deploys, and to reduce costly mistakes by selecting infrastructure that is not needed.

Q: Do you offer any discounts on more than one stack?

A: No. All of our stacks are pay-as-you-go; however, you can reduce your overall AWS hosting costs by up to 75% by taking advantage of AWS reserved pricing, and you can also qualify for one year of Free hosting on AWS. Overall these packages offer tremendous value when coupled with DIY aMiSTACX application stacks.

Q: Can you help migrate my data to my new stack?

A: Yes! Please contact support. We will first need to evaluate the migration conditions, and determine any cost and time.

Q: Why don’t you support Plesk, CPANEL, or other Web admin panels on your stacks?

A: We offer our own A51 console that is specifically designed for AWS, and is included with all our deployments. In addition, A51 does not require any special server-side agents or process hooks.

Q: Do I have to pay extra for the A51 Monitoring & Control Dashboard?

A: No.

Q: Can I register for A51 if I’m not an aMiSTACX Customer?

A: No.

Q: Do you change the default app paths?

A: No. The default paths by the application companies of the stack are great! Keeping everything in original allows easy upgrades, documented, and easy to find.

Q: Is aMiSTACX right for me?

A: It depends. Our stacks are designed for those with technical experience and capable of learning AWS, Linux, Windows, or a CMS. If you have no clue, or do not have time to learn, please DO NOT use our stacks. A full managed solution will be a much better solution for you, or you can contract aMiSTACX, or a certified aMiSTACX developer for assistance.

Many business owners have their own development team, or outsource development and DevOps. In this hybrid model, they can capture a reduction of costs compared to larger more expensive hosting providers.

Q: Are the stacks documented?

A: Yes! All stacks have basic deployment documentation. This site and our Bot also have answers to common technical questions, and you can check our site for deployment videos.

Q: Do you harden your stacks in any way?

A: No! The reason is the default Ubuntu OS is very secure. Also, hardening breaks installs, and typically slows down performance. We recommend using AWS security groups, ACLs, and firewalls whenever possible, and Cloud Application Firewalls that act as a global threat prevention service. Cloudflare.com and Dome9.com are great examples. Also, Amazon’s AWS Web Application Firewall [WAF] is a highly recommended service. All of these services offer great centralized management and global security protection.

Q: Can I request an EC2 class that is not available for deployment?

A: Yes! Please contact support and we will see what options are available.

Q: What FPC modules do you support?

A: We fully support, recommend, and pre-install Ramjet [for Magento Open Source] or Redis for caching. For our Magento stacks 2.3+ we also offer our own Ramjet cache booster module that works great with Redis. Note: We don’t support anything that rhymes with Barnish.

Q: Do you offer or support Magento [Adobe] Commerce or Enterprise?

A: No. We only have the OSE [Open Source Edition] editions available for deployments.

Q: What support do you offer?

A: We support the base stack and default application as delivered via AWS Marketplace to be functionable at delivery with a certain level of performance. For example, we know that using a Magento 2.2.5 aMiSTACX stack on an AWS EC2 properly configured with our recommendations will achieve average load times ~ 2 seconds or better, and be stable without crashing. Ultimately the CMS author is responsible for application bugs, and the customer is responsible for server security, backups, and OS and CMS patches. Additionally, any third-party plugins are the responsibility of those authors.

We frequently update our stacks when we see an opportunity to improve them, for performance, security, or ease of use. At the option of the customer, they should be able to migrate or apply stack updates at their discretion. It is obvious that all upgrades should be tested in a development environment first.

aMiSTACX also provides proprietary plugins and modules developed in-house that will add CMS features such as High Availability [HA] at the web tier, RDS Database HA, and management dashboards for your aMiSTACX servers. All included depending on the stack that is selected. These in-house modules and products will be fully supported by aMiSTACX.

We also provide AWS infrastructure tips and general guidance for Magento and WordPress, and how to deploy such AWS infrastructure to maximize performance with an aMiSTACX stack .

Q: Do you support the installation of 3rd party modules?

A: Yes and No. These will be treated on a case-by-case basis. Modules known to collect personal usage data, have back-door tracking, and/or are in questionable violation of the GDRP and/or CAPPA, no. These types of modules will NOT be supported.

Q: Why aMiSTACX?

A: Because no only do they just work, they are extremely fast, and we know our stacks inside and out. We keep everything as simple as possible, using tools that we know will work, and then hand that all off to you in a neat little package. Everything is designed to fit together and just work. All turnkey with very few post configurations.

All of our development and administration takes place in the USA. Additionally, we continue to add new value-added features for our aMiSTACX customers such as plugins, and our management A51 dashboard!

And we keep improving our stacks all the time.

Weaponize your Business with aMiSTACX!

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