JetRails COVID-19 Response Update

As a web host, we’re seeing and feeling the impacts, good and bad, that our clients and partners are experiencing due to the COVID-19 crisis. As we recently reported, our company is well-positioned to continue providing top-notch service and support. Our next move was to begin both looking for ways that we can help businesses impacted by the current crisis, while simultaneously communicating with clients and partners to gain insights and see what we can do to be supportive. Here’s what’s come out of that effort so far:

Ups & Downs

In the eCommerce world, merchants are experiencing a variety of ups and downs. Businesses selling food, relevant medical and safety supplies and personal care items, home office, exercise, and education products are, by and large, seeing an uptick in sales. Businesses selling luxury and outdoor goods are more often seeing declines. 

As a web host, we’re here to support both businesses that are facing either type of challenge. For businesses seeing a boost in traffic, we’re here to help with load testing and scalability issues. For organizations feeling the pressure of a sales slump, we can help businesses downsize hosting environments, or get hosting credits to cut down on their short term expenses. We’re also committed to helping brick-and-mortar businesses that are now pressured to get online for the first time.

Turning Thought Into Action

While we’re proud of our individual contributions and efforts, it takes a village to be successful in eCommerce. That village has grown over the years and turns out to be a pretty amazing place to reside. We’re excited to be taking part in initiatives that are focused on supporting existing eCommerce businesses. This includes:

Offline2On.com

This effort is focused on helping offline merchants launch eCommerce sites quickly. There are over 1000 experts from the eCommerce community participating in this group. Many participants are volunteering to donate resources to help small businesses, like web design and development. At JetRails, we’ve pledged up to 6 months of free hosting for sites built through this initiative.

TomPuchalski.com

Our own Tom Puchalski has been organizing an effort to support merchants that are already up-and-running in eCommerce. Whether you need help because you need to add curbside pickup as an option to your website, you’re having shipping and fulfillment issues as Amazon focuses on essential goods, you need web hosting help, your sales are down and you don’t know what kind of marketing to deploy, or any other changes to your businesses due to the current crisis, we want to help get you free consults from industry experts. As an additional benefit, some of our hosting infrastructure partners, like Digital Ocean and AWS, have offered credits to support businesses in need of support through this effort.

The JetRails Podcast

We’ve begun shifting our content calendar, inviting guests to speak about what they’ve seen in previous recessions, downturns, and natural disasters, and what they’re seeing this time. We want to make sure that we all stay informed about what’s really happening in the eCommerce world during this pandemic. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts to learn insights from industry experts.

Magento 1 End of Life Support

As this Coronavirus Crisis took hold, there were calls from members of the Magento community at large, like Karen Baker, for Adobe to extend the life of Magento 1. We’ve been told that this will not be happening. With that in mind, we’re out there trying to dispel rumors about misunderstandings about M1 EOL. We want merchants to know that they can work with vendors like Mage-One and JetRails to solve their needs if they won’t be able to migrate off of M1 before it reaches end of life: https://jetrails.com/magento-1-eol-end-of-life-quick-guide/ 

Just as importantly, we’re sharing that while JetRails is bringing together the best names in security to keep your site safe and PCI Compliant, this is not a black-box solution that’s only available to JetRails customers. It’s a lot more cumbersome to properly and effectively manage malware and intrusion detection and monitoring, firewalls, server software maintenance and management. That’s why we’ve brought together partners like Sucuri, Cloudflare, and Sansec as part of our effort – but these best-in-class solutions are publicly available. We’re happy to chat with any Magento 1 merchant about what it will take to keep their M1 site safe.

Final Thoughts

We’re here for you! If there’s something that we can do to help, we hope that you’ll reach out and allow us to leverage our resources and introduce our partners in order to assist you through these unique and turbulent times.