Collin Street Bakery - Magento Web Hosting Case Study

Collin Street Bakery, the home of the world-famous DeLuxe® Fruitcake, has been family-owned-and-operated since 1896 and is still serving up the same Old-World recipes that keep families coming back generation after generation. While the bakery grew locally in Texas and through a highly-successful mail-order service, eCommerce has continued to expand on the much-loved tradition of sending these Fruitcakes, Pecan cakes, and other delectable treats around the globe as gifts. Whether you're ordering 1 for your family or 1000 as corporate gifts, Collin Street Bakery's website will deliver a fast and easy experience.

"Whenever I have an issue, I have been able to count on JetRails to help with a resolution. At one point, I was looking at setting up VPN access to our framework and I was looking at extra monthly fees, but JetRails asked for a little time to better understand what we were trying to accomplish and they were able to architect a solution that was as secure but had no additional cost. It’s refreshing to have a partner that isn’t always looking at expanding the monthly recurring charges but is truly vested in your success. Thanks, JetRails for being an outstanding partner!"

Evan Rosay, IT Director, Collin Street Bakery

Challenge

Collin Street Bakery was looking to modernize the web-hosting and e-commerce platform to provide a much better customer experience. They were looking to move from LiveSite to Magento. Collin Street Bakery started with hosting Magento with a web hosting provider, MageMojo, but in short order identified that they needed a vendor that would better optimize and support a hosting environment for their specific Magento website, including a variety of Magento extensions and integrations. They were on the hunt for a team that provided tailored hosting environments and that delivered mission-critical support. They needed a partner that would more quickly and definitively resolve any issues that might arise in the course of operating and further customizing their site.

JetRails Action Plan

The JetRails team understood that Collin Street Bakery needed a Magento 2 hosting solution that they could rely on. Since this website experiences seasonal traffic surges, a cloud hosting environment was considered. However, since the traffic increases are predictable, a bare-metal environment was selected. Collin Street Bakery now has a dedicated cluster of servers for their Magento 2 frontend and backend, as well as a dedicated staging environment for their developers. In addition, JetRails spins up booster servers to address seasonal periods of heightened eCommerce traffic. This allows Collin Street Bakery to meet their scalability needs seamlessly without paying for additional hardware year-round.

To ensure the hosting migration would be successful, the JetRails team planned out every step of the move, providing a dedicated hosting migration expert from our team to manage the process from start to finish. This process included user-acceptance-testing (UAT) processes to test and certify that the Magento 2 site operated as intended in the new hosting environment prior to finalizing the migration.

As part of the onboarding process, JetRails was able to make sure that Collin Street Bakery’s website was checking all of the necessary boxes to operate effectively. That included deploying tools from JetRails partners like Cloudflare, Sansec, and Sucuri to address speed and security optimization. By utilizing the right mix of CDN, WAF, IDS, SSL, and other tools, JetRails is able to provide critical solutions from malware scanning to DNS management. Paired with JetRails 24/7 network operations center (NOC) services, and additional services like off-server backups, JetRails has architected a complete hosting solution that goes beyond raw infrastructure and focuses on the actual objectives of the Collin Street Bakery team.

In addition to architecting this hosting environment, the JetRails team has conducted website load tests in order to ensure that the environment is truly ready for peak traffic events, configured for complex integrations such as with Collin Street Bakery’s ERP, and deployed and optimized caching systems. Those include Varnish which works with the JetRails Magento 2 Varnish Extension, and Redis which JetRails runs as a separate instance for backend caching.

Beyond a successful launch with reliable and proactive support, JetRails has also continued to put forward new action plans as needed. For example, when Collin Street Bakery planned their upgrade from Magento 2.3.x to Magento 2.4.x, JetRails provided a reliable upgrade path. This included a plan to introduce upgraded instances into the existing deployment, rather than upgrade in place. This allowed their developers to run the Magento upgrade and then easily save and restore the Magento database on a new MySQL 8.0 instance. Redis and Elasticsearch workloads were also able to shift over seamlessly. JetRails uses this same process to upgrade web server operating systems and software without needing to declare a maintenance window. In this particular upgrade, Collin Street Bakery was able to introduce Elasticsearch 7, Redis 6, and other updates and dependencies of M2.4.

Partners

JetRails works closely with Collin Street Bakery and the Bakery eCommerce consultants, Peak Beyond, who orchestrate their Magento strategy, optimization, and maintenance. JetRails has also been able to support integrations like Klaviyo in ways that the previous hosting environment failed to. With JetRails on the hosting side, and the team at Essence of Email supporting managing Collin Street Bakery’s e-mail campaigns they’ve seen significant growth through this marketing channel.