The Differences Between Web Hosting & Mission Critical eCommerce

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JetRails has been gaining in popularity in eCommerce communities like Magento and Shopware. When we went to evaluate why they’ve been growing in these established markets, we immediately noticed that they brand themselves as “mission-critical.” So, we asked ourselves the obvious question: “What makes their mission-critical hosting different from other web hosting solutions?” What we found was a team that’s dedicated to meeting the needs of eCommerce merchants and developers. Meet our new partner – JetRails. Below, we explain why it is a mission-critical platform and what other benefits it offers.

Why Mission-Critical?

eCommerce merchants are highly impacted by performance issues, downtime, and security incidents. These businesses need their online stores to be fast, secure, scalable, and reliable. Period.

Traditional web hosting is built around a self-service “hands-off” model, which doesn’t align well with highly customized sites with exacting needs. So, JetRails has created a business model around the needs, goals, and expectations of eCommerce merchants. 

The Ingredients

Many web hosts try to be jacks-of-all-trades, providing users with a variety of basic homegrown tools to satisfy bare-minimum requirements.

While JetRails does provide some tools, like JRCTL – their command line interface, they rely on best-in-class partners to enhance their offerings. This includes partners like AWS, Cloudflare, ImageEngine, SanSec, and Sucuri. 

The final product is a fully-managed hosting environment complete with must-haves like a managed Content Delivery Network, Web Application Firewall, Intrusion Detection System, Malware Scanner, Bot Mitigation, Image Optimization, and more. 

They go way above and beyond providing an SSL and some backups.

They have created some Magento extensions, like their popular Cloudflare Extension and their Varnish Extension, both of which make using these services more efficient.

Recipe For Success

They start out by sizing out the perfect hosting environment for a business based upon a variety of metrics, like peak traffic. They use this information to recommend solutions, including dedicated servers and elastic AWS environments.

After the architecture is chosen, JetRails builds out the environment and assists with migrating the client over. Through this process, they tailor the hosting to the user, optimize and configure the resources, and make sure that everything runs smoothly during their user acceptance testing (UAT) phase.

Once live, they continue to fully manage and maintain these environments. 

The Service

This is the #1 area where JetRails stands out. Many formerly prominent Magento hosts have been focusing on products over support. All the while, JetRails has continued to double down on support.

JetRails customers have a dedicated account manager who helps ensure that, from speed enhancements and load tests to cost optimization, their clients are continually set up for success.

Support is available by phone and ticket, 24/7, and includes active monitoring from the JetRails network operation center (NOC). Response times are measured in minutes, not hours or days, and most requests and issues are resolved by the first support technician. JetRails has built a more highly-skilled team, avoiding the need for constant escalations.

Substitutions Are On The Menu

Since JetRails architects and customizes their hosting environments around the needs of each client, your website isn’t boxed into a multi-tenant solution that was built for an “average” user. 

They can also support other applications. Need help hosting other software, like a WordPress blog or Pimcore product information management system? No problem. JetRails will provide properly secured and optimized hosting environments, allowing you to manage all of your PHP-based applications with one host.

Instead of trying to get your site to do what you want within a rigid hosting environment, you get flexibility. 

The Bill

By now, you’re probably thinking that JetRails prices must be sky-high. This is the area where we were most surprised. JetRails offers development environments starting at $99 dollars per month. Production environments start at $499 per month and include the CDN, WAF, IDS, dedicated account manager, and so on. 

What we liked even better was the transparent and fair billing model. 

On bare-metal, they have predetermined flat rates. You know what your costs will be based on your hardware. This is perfect if you have predictable web traffic. Even better, if you need more hardware temporarily, such as during the holiday shopping season, they offer Boost Servers™ that you can add on a per-month basis without needing to pay for extra hardware all year long.

On AWS, where JetRails offers autoscaling, self-healing hosting environments, you see the AWS charges and pay JetRails a predetermined management fee. There are no artificial flat rates that round the price up – you pay the AWS metered charges. There are no overage penalties – you pay for what you use. 

Partnerships

The JetRails Partner Program offers agencies Slack channels for direct communications. They also provide recurring Customer Success check-in meetings to ensure they’re working together effectively to support mutual customers. They listen closely to the agencies and dev teams that are using their service. 

They even come up with innovative solutions for partners with unique needs, like what they recently announced for the new Amasty PaaS.

The Takeaway

Merchants burn out from open-source eCommerce platforms when they can’t get the hosting service and support that they need and when hosts and devs don’t communicate together effectively. JetRails isn’t new to this space, but it’s easy to see why they’re growing in eCommerce at the same time that other hosts are refocusing their efforts away from platforms like Magento. If you also want to become our partner, contact us.