SkuNexus is using Nexcess to host our order management system - offering unique competitive advantages for mission critical systems. When asked about the importance of good cloud hosting, Nexcess had this to say:
When you hear the term Cloud, a certain type of experience is expected. Scalability, security, performance, and ease of use are just a part of that. Through listening to clients and partners, our team has built something better; something that realizes the promise of Cloud.
We're thrilled to be using Nexcess to manage one of the most important components of our system.
You can see that system in action by scheduling a demo, right here.
The Importance of Good Hosting
Commerce operations is a key part of every ecommerce business, and many brick and mortar businesses.
Without it, new orders are handled one by one (manually), and it quickly becomes the bottleneck for efficiency as the business grows.
Once a business has upped their game they begin to focus on efficiency and scalability - which are not possible without a good host behind the system.
What Makes a Good Host?
Hosting doesn’t garner the same attention as companies like Facebook or Google, although they typically power the technology that makes those companies tick.
They’re also an integral part of any business that uses technology (every business does) that wants to grow.
The top three things we look for in a host are support, uptime, and scalability.
Support
Support is all too similar to insurance - you don’t need it until something goes wrong.
But, when something does go wrong, you want the best that you possibly can get.
Good support is 24/7/365 for a service like hosting, and employs individuals who are excellent listeners and communicators.
After all, understanding the problem is the first step to fixing it. When you get on the phone with support, you want your issue to be resolved as soon as possible, and anything that gets in the way of that is going to be frustrating.
Support is always an important factor, but more so because it is what powers so much of your business.
It’s not just your time, it’s your employees time, the company’s money, and so much more.
Uptime
When managing websites or anything hosted online, uptime is incredibly important.
Without great uptime, companies can lose revenue, customers, and the ability to work (or solve any of those problems). A good host has an uptime of 99.9% uptime or better (Nexcess includes this in their SLA).
You all remember the day the internet died in February of 2017?
If your business is affected by an event like this, you could lose a significant amount of money. And if this happens during a peak or holiday season, it can be far more detrimental.
Scalability
When businesses grow, their hosting needs do too.
A good host can throttle up or down quickly, allowing you to change bandwidth on the fly, without having to renegotiate a contract or go through a complex process.
With the cloud, scaling should happen automatically.
When the holiday season hits, and your website traffic quadruples, it’s important your hosting compensates for it flawlessly.
It’s something that only gets attention from ecommerce professionals when it isn’t working. A good hosting solution is paradoxical in that when it’s doing its job very well, you likely won’t notice it at all.
Why Nexcess?
Simply put, Nexcess meets (and exceeds) these three requirements for a good host:
- They have 24/7/365 support
- They have uptime better than 99.9% (and back it up in their SLA)
- They’re cloud hosting can scale up and down seamlessly
- They also own their own data centers, which is important for organizations that value security and privacy
Because of their rich history of hosting enterprise level open source systems such as Magento, Nexcess was a perfect fit for the SkuNexus platform.
How This Partnership Originated
To understand how this partnership originated, we have to travel back in time to a land before SkuNexus.
Our CEO and Founder, Yitz Lieblich, was looking for a host for his Magento development agency, Web Solutions NYC. It wouldn’t be a host for a single project, he was building a portfolio and an entire business, so he needed a reliable, responsive company, because his clients were depending on it.
He found Nexcess, was pleased with the quality of their hosting, and has since found that they are the most reliable host, and have very competitive pricing. They became his preferred host for Magento clients, still to this day.
When SkuNexus was founded, it was an easy decision to choose Nexcess as our hosting partner.
About Nexcess
Nexcess has been deploying application-specific hosting solutions since 2000. With over 18 years of extensive benchmarking, testing, support, and hosting experience, they’ve developed a platform that helps optimize the way you do business.
Increased flexibility, security, and the performance your business needs, combined with proactive support and intuitive controls to create a solution that realizes the promise of Cloud.
About SkuNexus
SkuNexus is the brainchild of long-time ecommerce industry leader and Magento development agency, Web Solutions NYC. We serve mid-market and enterprise businesses who are looking to more effectively operate and drive their commerce and order fulfillment on a revolutionized, modern solution.
To do that we created a tool that is the first of its kind: a fully customizable, all-in-one, open source order management system. Many vendors say their systems are customizable, but SkuNexus offers access to the source code behind the software and empowers customers to change the core functionality of the system in a way they never could before.
