Zanders Magento Web Hosting Case Study

Zanders has been a trusted wholesale distributor of sporting goods since 1962. This Illinois-based all-woman-owned business supplies retailers with everything from bows and arrows to ATV parts and accessories.

“Our eCommerce website is our top sales generator as well as our largest sales tool. We needed an enhanced platform that would meet our current business demand while providing scalability for growth. JetRails & CSS Commerce successfully collaborated to deliver an ideal web solution that considered our future needs.”

Herb Seeger

Challenge

When the Zanders team approached JetRails, their Rackspace hosting environment wasn’t meeting their needs. Their Magento website loaded slowly and was unreliable.

JetRails Action Plan

JetRails migrated Zanders to an auto-scaling AWS environment. This environment was optimized for speed, security, and scalability. Cloud servers were optimized for the needs of the Magento 2 deployment, the Pimcore software, Site 24×7’s website monitoring tools, and their integration between Magento and their Elliott ERP.

The AWS architecture includes 2 frontend web nodes at off-peak times, but horizontally auto-scales with more EC2 nodes at the ready. Similarly, RDS Aurora databases for Magento 2, Pimcore, and the Elliott ERP proxy integration are hosted in multiple AWS Availability Zones, addressing the need for failover solutions in case of an outage at an AWS data center.

The new fully-managed hosting environment includes a wide range of security and optimization tools, including Cloudflare, SanSec, and Maldet.

Partners

Zanders has relied on two main service providers to improve the experience that their staff and their B2B shoppers receive from their eCommerce website.

While Jetrails is proud to be one of those trusted vendors, this project has been steered by the team at CSS Commerce. CSS Commerce has helped the Zanders team with their Magento 1 website, a complete migration to Magento 2 with advanced search capabilities, the deployment of Pimcore’s product information management (PIM) software, the creation of a mobile app, and the integration of the client’s ERP platform.

Results

Before working with JetRails, Zanders had a time to first byte (TTFB) of 1.752 seconds. In working with JetRails, that number averages 0.189 seconds. Their total load time was average 5 to 10 seconds in tests recorded before they migrated to JetRails but is now consistently down to approximately 2 seconds. These tremendous speed improvements have all been achieved while still using a traditional Magento theme.

Between the work done by JetRails and CSS Commerce, this B2B merchant has experienced a 3x increase in eCommerce revenue!

Their single-tenant AWS environment has consistently scaled to meet their needs, and the use of multiple AWS availability zones has meant that the Zanders team can rely on redundant solutions being in place.