Since 2012, ViewSonic has hosted its ecommerce solution on Magento, now owned by Adobe. Viewsonic is a leading provider of monitors, displays, and projection equipment for both consumers and businesses.
After one year of hosting their Magento v1 solution on the Webscale Stratus platform, we spoke to Mark Won, Lead Web Developer at ViewSonic about his experience working with Webscale Stratus compared to previous hosting environments.
Mark Won, Lead Developer
According to Won, there were two primary motivations for relocating ViewSonic’s Magento platform to Webscale Stratus. The first was Webscale’s Magento-centric expertise. In years past, Won said their previous provider would simply defer any problem related to Magento, leaving Won and his team scrambling to figure out how to resolve issues. The issues were often security-related, and the inability of their hosting provider to recommend—much less enact—mitigation actions never sat well with Won.
Second, Won wanted to move ViewSonic to cloud-based environments to accommodate the diverse geographic distribution of their customers. “It’s important to be able to deliver content as fast as possible to the consumer,” said Won. After asking for recommendations in a Magento Slack channel, he quickly realized that Webscale Stratus was most often recommended as one that would fit his criteria.
Won frequently monitors the website’s performance and he shared with us two striking reports on performance. The first is a speed test report from when ViewSonic was hosted at the previous provider.
As Won admits, “there’s still room for improvement,” but he really likes the marked increase in overall performance.
One almost invisible feature of Webscale Stratus that has really added to ViewSonic’s bottom line is the auto-scaling of Stratus. As Won admitted, “I really don’t know when it kicks in, but I can tell you that we have not had the slow-down complaints from customers—at all—that we used to have with our old hosting setup.” During the 2020 pandemic, sales of ViewSonic monitors exploded, and having his Magento site hosted on Webscale Stratus allowed ViewSonic to easily handle the surge in orders and overall traffic without any disruptions or slowdowns.
As ViewSonic prepares to move to Magento 2, Won is confident that Webscale Stratus will remain their preferred hosting provider. In large part based on the service and support provided so far.
“We were getting pounded by traffic from varying IP addresses,” Won explained, “We just couldn’t figure out how to stop it until Webscale’s support team figured out the common patterns of the hits and were able to shut them down.” This level of expertise was unlike any Won had experienced before. ViewSonic’s previous hosting provider simply passed it off to ViewSonic to cure it as it “was a Magento issue.”
Over the first year of hosting with Webscale, Won has leveraged Webscale’s support team to help with a wide variety of issues beyond security. In fact, according to Won, the speed and expertise with which the Webscale support team reacts to his requests is one of the biggest game-changers. From fixing issues with the Fishpig WordPress integration to personal guidance on how to avoid random 404s, Won has continued to be amazed at the depth of knowledge so easily at his fingertips.
“I love that I can communicate with the team that knows our installation without having to re-train or re-familiarize support people each time,” according to Won. As an Enterprise client, Won receives a dedicated Slack channel giving him and his team immediate, 24/7 access to Webscale support.
“Our previous hosting provider had someone who would answer a support ticket during the night, but they would not take any action except during normal business hours,” explained Won. “With Webscale, we get immediate help any time, day or night.”
We asked Won if he had used the Webscale Stratus Control Panel. He responded, “Oh, yes! I really love that I can regex for patterns in logs within the control panel. I don’t have to SSH into the server, download the logs, then run some SQL statements. It makes it so easy for me to analyze our logs and search for actionable information.”
Frequently during our interview, Won reiterated the depth of Magento expertise of Webscale’s team that has “really made the difference” in ViewSonic’s ability to easily handle the surge in business during the pandemic. He is especially pleased with the security expertise of Webscale’s support team.
Won is so confident in Webscale’s ability to support ViewSonic that he is looking forward to continuing with Magento as ViewSonic’s primary platform. He is currently working with Brandastic to craft their new Magento 2 version.
