Search Results - nginx

Cloud costs more than anticipated

While cloud gives flexibility and scaling, cloud costs continue to put pressure on RoI (Return on Investment) calculations for eCommerce stores. Merchants migrating from physical hardware find the cloud costs especially high.

luroConnect recognizes that and offers to reduce cloud hosting bills by upto 30%, offering various strategies to do so.

luroConnect is cloud agnostic

luroConnect deploys on any cloud or physical hardware - as long as the platform is open, allowing RHEL compatible linux to be installed. This allows leveraging the best cost deal you can get from a cloud provider.

This allows our customers to select the best hosting or cloud service they prefer due to reasons like geography, discounts or commitment to a cloud provider.

Here are typical server size and cost for 3 major cloud services.

(Sample pricing as per respective portals)

luroConnect uses open source rather than cloud supported equivalents

All components required to host Magento open source and commerce, are open source. That includes nginx, apache, php, mysql, Redis, rabbit-mq and varnish. While cloud providers offer managed service around a open source or a open source compatible proprietary implementation, there is no need to use them.

luroConnect provides services on open source. Moreover, luroConnect is a "done-for-you" service - updates, configuration changes, etc are done by luroConnect keeping in mind performance and security of the website.

Example AWS pricing difference between RDS and luroConnect managed Percona mysql

(Mumbai Region as per AWS simple monthly calculator)

luroConnect keeps up with technology to help reduce costs

luroConnect has the capability of building from open source - not just use what is available. This gives us the ability to keep up with technology, especially when it comes to more performant and / or cost saving to our customers.

A prime example of cost saving is use of AWS ARM (a1.large) processors for our nginx & varnish instances - the luroConnect/Edge. a1.large is 40% cheaper than c5.large with the same number of cores and memory.

AWS pricing for different instance types

(Mumbai Region as per AWS simple monthly calculator)

As AWS releases Graviton2 ARM processors which are benchmarked by AWS to be upto 25% faster and yet 25% cheaper, luroConnect will release "luroConnect/Edge" and other components on the new AWS M6G, C6G and R6G instances.

luroConnect manages the infrastructure at the application level

Managing infrastructure is not your headache anymore - with luroConnect, your application is fully managed with proactive monitoring and 24x7 service. Features like our cloud control panel that allows you to run Magento indexing, deploy code and perform other activities that required to login to the production server, reduce your cost of running operations.

Conclusion

luroConnect's investment in software and technology works for its merchant customers, improving RoI of their online business.

If you are interested in reducing your cloud costs like the one below, signup for a free consultation.

Many times, when your hosting service reports that you are running out of CPU or memory, they suggest you take a higher hosting plan. This results in designing for peak requirement. A large AWS instance 5x and above can almost always be tuned down with a scalable architecture. luroConnect's inherent scalable architecture allows such cost reductions even without autoscale. For larger instances it makes sense to use autoscale.

luroConnect also believes in tuning caches - a key component to help reduce hosting costs. With our advanced tracking and healing, we continuously tune caches for optimal performance and hosting costs.

Since you run your business on a public website, being aware of security risks is crucial. On an average we see one or two attacks per day per website we host. Attackers may have many intentions - from simply causing trouble, to hold the website owner to ransom, to skimming data from the website, to increasing your cloud bill. Adding layers of security, allowing the traffic you need in and disallowing internet access to those you do not want, is crucial to your business.

luroConnect's multi-layered security approach has many components :

• Web Application Firewall - built into our nginx, WAF filters out traffic after examining its content. SQL and other injection can be best blocked here. However, WAF needs tuning on a per site basis - to reduce false positives. luroConnect includes custom rulesets tuned for each website by our WAF experts.
• Rate limit and IP address blacklisting.
• BOT blocker - filtered using the HTTP User Agent field.
• Protecting admin login with HTTP password (when 2FA is not available) and periodic admin user role and password change reminder
• File system security - ensuring code directories are not writable.
• Ensuring upload folders cannot execute js or php code
• Code deployment security
• Sansec security scanner
• Secure backup process
• Allowing images to be securely uploaded without exposing the real folder structure (needed when uploading products in a csv)

These rules are based on known type of attacks. Magecart works by inserting javascript code in the checkout page so it can skim user information. However, in order for this to work, it needs a vulnerable file or database to insert its code into. By disallowing upload to a directory into which code resides we prevent one way malicious code can be inserted.

We routinely blog about security in Magento and Wordpress.

As campaigns and returning customers drive up website traffic, scale becomes important. Difference between understanding performance and scale is important and an analogy will help. While better performance is like a faster car, scale is like a better highway. On the cloud, it is easier to add lanes and remove them.

While AWS and other cloud auto scaling is huge win and almost a necessity for some websites, cold start issues - time it takes for new resources to be ready and available - make it one of many strategies.

luroConnect offers many strategies to scale, depending on the exact situation. To start with, the architecture allows many strategies to be applied. At the heart there is a path based load balancer - our nginx load balancer that can direct traffic to app servers based on URL.

Strategies include

Warm servers - useful if a campaign is known to drive traffic. A smaller warm server is kept standby to take additional traffic. These are with knowledge of campaigns to ensure expenses are kept in control.

Time based servers - for websites with high daytime admin usage, additional server is turned on to take admin traffic during working hours. Off hours admin traffic is served from the main app servers. This strategy can be applied to other time based known traffic patterns.

Checkout servers if campaigns drive huge browsing traffic, one or more checkout servers will take traffic from customers who have started the checkout flow.

Other things that help improve scale

We like to ensure caches are warm. Periodically and especially during cache clear events, our Smart Cache Warmer ensures most likely pages are in cache reducing the chances of a real user getting a cache miss.

Our 0-downtime code deploy ensures code release while the website is live. (0-downtime can only be achieved if there are no database changes in Magento). Scheduled deploy can also be used to deploy code automatically on low traffic times.

Interested in talking to us about how your website can scale better? Schedule a time below and we can analyze your website for free.

Development, SEO, Marketing, Site Speed - you do it all!

As a web agency, you have to wear multiple hats for your customers. Customers are looking for a one stop shop for their eCommerce needs for example. Development, SEO, marketing, optimized hosting, etc.

You are also sucked into all activities a customer wants, mostly because you want your customers to succeed, or maybe out of fear of losing. Some of these areas are core to you, some not so core. You build your skills, your people and it offers growth to you.

The evolving customer need - not just 24/7

Customer needs keep evolving. One prime example is in the choice of platform. With popularity of SaaS platforms like shopify, agencies are stretched to help a customer decide the platform and deliver on it. Sure there are clear cases where shopify is all the customer may need, but the border areas abound. Will the platform be the best choice now and in the future? In the future what type of integration and customization will the customer need?

SaaS offers lower complexity, an easier onboarding and a lower initial TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). Instead, Magento offers flexibility, but adds complexity to run the store - specifically related to hosting and maintenance. For example, customers never have to worry about site speed with SaaS while that is a specialty in itself for Magento.

Uptime is not all that a customer needs - indeed uptime is expected. Your customers want you to go beyond and deliver the best user experience to their visitors - so their brand value is enhanced.

Presenting, luroConnect for Magento & Wordpress

A multi-cloud hosting stack for Magento & Wordpress, accompanied by a 24x7 service, backed by realtime analytics and alerting to ensure a SaaS-like smooth experience to the merchant.

We go beyond

With features for agency like

• Automated builds and deploys using our dashboard to staging or production. Rollback releases. Near 0-downtime deployment.
• Magento, Wordpress, Headless & PWA
• lurocomnect / Insights dashboard to help you monitor each customer's website in a single interface

Features for your customers to help you deliver the high quality digital experience you have developed

• High performance stack with options like a varnish cluster, autoscale, cache tuning and help with identifying performance bottlenecks.
• Multi-cloud support - let the customer decide or give a variety of options for hosting and CDN.
• Highly secure hosting stack : Web Application Firewall (WAF), a IP and BOT blocker, a load balancer all integrated into the nginx web server.
• Disaster Recovery Plan - data replicated every 10 minutes to another cloud platform, giving a 15 minute time to switch with a max of 20 minute loss of data.

Come partner with us!

If you are a agency developing Magento or Wordpress websites, we offer you a partnership that allows you to offer your customers the flexibility of owning a platform at the convenience of SaaS. Our rich stack continues to evolve - with a set of features already built and more on the way.

Some very busy websites are hosted on our platform.

Benefits of a partnership

• We host talks for developers exclusively for our agency partners, where we speak about code and speed issues
• Blogs and joint promotion programmes
• (Soon to be launched) Be a part of the luroConnect podcast where we interview partners and merchants
• Be a part of an industry leading referral program

Who are we?

Our CEO, Mr Pradip Shah is a 35+ years experienced technology enthusiast and a frequent speaker at Meet Magento and Meetups.

Interested?

Email us at partner@luroconnect.com and we will get back to you. Or, if you prefer, send us a chat message using the box on your right. Please remember to give us your email / phone to contact you.