FAQ: Let me know more about support, migration, scaling and seeing MageStack in action

Support: Since I am the only person that handles server issues or programming issues, it would be nice to have you as a backup

We provide a fully managed service as standard, so we’ll be wholly responsible for maintaining the stack (security updates, features etc.). So thankfully, your duties can halve from server admin and dev – to just dev.

But in addition to that, we’ve got a considerable wealth of Magento development experience (we specialise in performance and scaling Magento stores) from out 6+ years of building Magento stores. So if you get stuck and need help – you don’t need to scour the internet looking for solutions, just turn to Sonassi for our expert support.

Migration: What does migration of my site look like?

Migration for a single installation is provided for free – and is fully managed by our team. Once you are a customer, we write a script to automate the migration of the store (taking into account any customisations etc. you have) – then using this script, we can time the duration of the migration, helping you plan accordingly for anticipated downtime when the live migration is scheduled.

The process of migration is utterly simple,

  1. We write a script to migrate the store
  2. We perform a trial migration, allowing you to fully test everything is working and measure the migration time
  3. We schedule a live migration date/time to suit you
    • A maintenance page will be put up on the existing live site to prevent inconsistencies in data during the transfer
    • Then, following the live migration, we change DNS records and (if we have root access) put traffic forwarding rules in place on your existing server to seamlessly forward to the new server (bypassing the need to wait for DNS propagation)

Scaling: Our site can spike to over 1000 concurrent users

For your promotional peaks, depending on how frequent they are, there’s two ways of scaling,

  1. Short term scaling via overflow servers for as little as 24 hours
  2. Long term scaling by increasing the size of your stack

Demo: I would like to try out your system, can I have a demo?

We can provide a free demo of your store on MageStack – which allows you to use the store frontend/admin and measure performance. However, the demo doesn’t expose any of the infrastructure/tools etc. – you’ll only have HTTP access, not full VPN+SSH (like a typical customer would have with their stack). We can provide a stack for 30-days for trialling, but there is a cost associated (contact us for more information).

To be honest though, there’s little to “see” behind the scenes, as the beauty of MageStack is its simplicity and shallow learning curve – we’ve designed it to look and feel like a normal, single, dedicated server running Debian Linux – so as far as you are concerned, it will just look like a normal Linux installation. The complexity for load balancing, replication etc. goes on behind the scenes – and its not something you ever “see”.

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