Excellent Performance & Support
Our company decided to make a switch from BlueHost VPS to AWS and desired a solid performance stack setup that required little initial setup and maintenance efforts from our internal IT, and provided a high level of support when needed.
History: BlueHost was deplorable. They do a very good job with affiliate marketing which drives a tremendous amount of positive online coverage, however, the performance was bad. Extremely long server response times, internal server errors and bad gateways was our experience, the things you can not control from cpanel or whm. Sure it is cheap, and if you are running a weekend blog it is likely fine. But driving an e-commerce site or any site that requires high end performance for best user experience will end up costing customers and revenue.
We spent several weeks reviewing various setups available from Bitnami, Amimoto and aMistacx and in the end decided to go with aMistacx. The two main reasons for us choosing them; first and foremost was speed and performance testing on sites that where running the same configured stack setup that they advertised. We where provided with a few example sites on the same setup that had requirements that exceeded ours which was great in understanding potential scalability. And second, just as important was support. From pre-order questions through completion we had quick responses which tends not to be the case with most WP/WC app developers.
We where able to remove quite a few performance enhancing plugins from our WP/WC setup as they where covered within the stack, this made performance even better on the front and backend. The S3Rocket setup + Cloudflare integration took care of just about all latency issues experienced with BlueHost.
We installed a copy of our site in a dev environment with this setup and allowed their techs to tweak and ended up with an AA rating on gtmetrix without striping the functionality we required for a positive user experience, delivering average load times around 1.5s.
Overall our experience to date has been fantastic and we are very happy with the performance of the setup. If you are looking to make a move to AWS or change from a self managed or preconfigured setup to this one, you wont be disappointed.
Sean brought to the table the kind of project aMiSTACX engineers love to get their hands on. Thinking of it in a way like NASCAR, the corporate sponsor wanted a fast and reliable CAR, and a great team behind it. Letting us drive the entire project while keeping in perspective what the client wanted feature and performance wise, gave us maximum flexibility to deliver a true turnkey WordPress WooCommerce performance stack. Now that FireFox and Chrome both support WebP, we even had the opportunity to flex some performance muscle with utilizing WebP on AWS S3 using our S3Rocket. [Probably a first.] In full race trim, we actually had load times per GTMetrix hovering at about 1.1 seconds before we had to pull back to 1.5s, because Sean was not able to let go of GA in favor of Matomo Analytics. We'll just have to save that trick for a future race. All-in-all this was the ideal project for aMiSTACX, skilled consultancy + aMiSTACX products = crossing the checked flag in first place, and way ahead of the pack. Thanks again! A.I