Happy Cyber Monday! We've been working hard over the past few months to get our clients ready for this year's holiday season and want to share some of the tricks of the trade we use to keep our e-commerce clients happy and their websites fast and responsive.
First, let's start with the platform. We're primarily a LAMP-based shop building sites in Drupal, Magento, and Wordpress, all of which have some-level of built-in caching or optimization modules.
Next up, caching at the edge with CloudFlare. Cloudflare has built a next-generation CDN that caches static files at the DNS-level, while providing other optimizations and security features as part of their service. Check out our previous blog post to find out more.
On to the environment. We leverage the persistence and elasticity of the Rackspace's Cloud environment, providing our customers a platform that is scalable vertically (by scaling up server sizes) and horizontally (through load balancing), maximizing their investment.
No two clients are exactly alike and neither is the end solution we provide. Some clients have more intensive database operations while others take a bigger hit on web server side. We have them both covered by leveraging caching engines like Varnish (front-end static resource caching) and Memcache (data-caching). Our dev team works closely with our hosting team to architect a robust, scalable solution, capable of handling the type of traffic we've become accustomed to on Black Friday and Cyber Monday (or even GivingTuesday for the nonprofits out there). So give us a buzz if your site isn't buzzing today! We can help.