It’s a look I see all the time. The “so… you guys are just another hosting provider?” look.
However, it’s a look that I enjoy watching fade away once I explain what our cloud automation and managed hosting platform can really do, as it’s right there that I see their “a-ha!” moment and they usually end up asking why we didn’t come to them sooner.
So… are we just another hosting provider?
This process of education is common to just about every deal I have ever closed, partly due to the fact that, for many e-commerce business owners, their backend hosting infrastructure is an afterthought. It’s something they only start paying attention to when things go wrong.
So I take time to explain to merchants that Webscale is more than just a hosting provider, that we guarantee application success, which for us means 100% site availability, blazing fast performance, and robust protection against cyberthreats and bot attacks.
Ever had downtime at the worst time?
Downtime is often one of the first challenges I hear about when speaking with merchants, whether it’s due to a massive traffic surge triggered by an influencer campaign, or worse, an attempt by a hacker to steal credit card information. If it’s the former, it’s something that should be welcomed, not feared. I like to tell them that at Webscale, we celebrate it!
Many of our customers have successfully run the biggest sales events of their company histories within the first week or two of working with us, with zero downtime.
Our predictive auto-scaling technology forecasts changes in user demand (site traffic) and proactively scales out / scales in application infrastructure, in real-time. This ensures 100% uptime and consistently high performance, regardless of load or traffic surges. It gives our customers the flexibility and freedom to “go wild” with their marketing campaigns without having to worry about downtime, slow page loads, or insufficient server capacity.
I heard from one merchant debating using Magento Cloud, that you’re required to provide several days’ notice when you need to scale out, and you can only do it a specific amount times per year. I can’t imagine any retailer being happy with curtailing the amount of marketing they do because of an imposed limit like that!
Are you doing everything you can to improve performance?
Every e-commerce site owner I speak to wants a fast website – no surprises there. There is a proven correlation between site performance and conversion rates and nobody wants to be in the position of sending their customers to a competitor’s site because of sluggish page load times.
Many of our customers have seen a noticeable increase in conversions once they’ve deployed Webscale, because we employ several best practices such as the use of HTTP/2, content delivery networks (CDNs), advanced page and content optimization techniques, dynamic site caching (caching of HTML pages and content for anonymous sessions), and configuring third-party assets to be deferred or downloaded in parallel.
We also deploy an image management solution that automatically resizes, reformats, or compresses images based on end user device and browser type, to enhance site performance.
How seriously are you taking security?
E-commerce platforms are very lucrative targets for hackers, and every merchant I speak to has either dealt with, or is currently experiencing a security issue, whether they know about it or not. Bots can make up more than 50% of their traffic, and while some of these are good search bots, others can be used to hijack sites, steal credit card data, or cause DDoS attacks.
Webscale’s security stack comprises a next-generation web application firewall (WAF) as well as advanced protection such as bot management (powered by machine learning) and intrusion detection to protect digital storefronts and their customer data.
Security patches are challenging to keep up with, but I help merchants understand how critical it is to install them immediately, as hackers monitor these feeds and search for sites that have failed to deploy them to gain admin access to their sites. We take care of this for all our customers, by staying on top of community news related to vulnerabilities, and rolling out patches immediately across our entire customer base before they can be exploited.
World-class infrastructure, with a support team to match
We run our customers’ applications on world-class cloud infrastructure, whether it’s from Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, or Microsoft Azure. You won’t find better hosting at an affordable price than with Webscale, if I do say so myself.
But above and beyond the awesome features and performance, the rubber really hits the road with support. For merchants considering Webscale, they care about having that person on the line who responds fast and knows their site inside out. Our team of cloud experts knows digital commerce, and they’re knocking it out of the park every day for over 1,000 online storefronts, 24 x 7 x 365!
Like your own “a-ha!” moment?
Drop us a line at sales@webscalenetworks.com or fill out this form for a free demo, and let us show you what we can do for your online storefront and digital experience.
