Last November AmeriCommerce let the world know that we were dedicated to improving our platform's speed, stability and security while promising great things to come in 2018 and beyond. We are super stoked to announce some major improvements to our infrastructure by successfully teaming up with Cloudflare to help significantly upgrade speed, boost security, and automate those pesky SSL's. Our support team may be reaching out to you and providing you with a DNS Record to change so that you can unlock all these amazing new features. This redefining of our platform helps improve how our online stores react to requests across the web in every way so our users, and us, can focus on what's important - selling more stuff!
AmeriCommerce intends to offer a robust set of improvements that users are going to drool over. We will be introducing our users to the fastest performance managed DNS money can buy, integrating a new Global Content Delivery Network, improved Web Application Firewall, Load Balancer, Argo Smart Routing, SSL Automation and of course one of, if not the best, Denial of Service (DDOS) protection & mitigation services in the world. Not only does this improve the delivery of our powerful multi-store ecommerce platform, but it also gives AmeriCommerce future flexibility. What type of flexibility? Flexibility to grow into even more scalable and automated datacenter environments, flexibility to offer faster platform delivery methods and flexibility to provide new tools and services for our users. We TOLD you 2018 was going to be awesome!
Here is a rundown on improvements we are introducing:
- CDN (Content Delivery Network) - Not just any CDN, this is the next generation Content Delivery Network that the World has been needing. This CDN was designed and built to integrate emerging technologies to ensure users receive the most advanced protocols on the web; today and tomorrow to infinity and beyond! The network caches your content across its global network, bringing it closer to visitors from every region. This results in an average speed request of just 9ms while those without it garner an average speed request of 31ms. Hello speed!
- Automated SSLs & Cheaper Fees – Keeping your online store secure with an SSL keeps data protected, increases user experience, reduces bounce rate, and is highly recommended by Google. Today, this is a process where you purchase an SSL, answer some questions, have us install the SSL and then have to renew it every year or two. No more! We can do better. We have decided that AmeriCommerce will now automate the entire SSL lifecycle for our merchants, from purchasing to deploying as well as renewing certificates (which is done in seconds) allowing us to offer this benefit as part of our customer onboarding. We are passing the automation savings directly to our merchants and giving time back every year. No more expirations or renewals to worry about! (come on, this deserves a high-five)
- Keep the bad traffic OUT & the good traffic IN - If you're tired of battling to keep those pesky bots and spammers away from your site, then we've heard your cries. Our new filtering will keep out the unwanted attention an eCommerce online store brings to the web and help keep your data more accurate and secure.
- WAF (Web Application Firewall) - Upgrading to a new and improved enterprise-class web application firewall (WAF) will continue to protect your website and our application from common vulnerabilities like SQL injection attacks, cross-site scripting, and cross-site forgery requests. The current AmeriCommerce WAF has done a tremendous job to this point, however Cloudflare’s ability to stay ahead of the security curve in this industry allows our users to know we are always looking towards the future.
- Denial of Service (DDOS) Mitigation - The frequency and strength of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks is on the rise. Through the exploitation of millions of insecure Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, the creation of botnets waging highly distributed volumetric attacks is easier and more impactful than ever before. Application layer attacks are far more sophisticated, often requiring fewer resources to bring down a website or application, and can disrupt ecommerce operations with even greater impact. AmeriCommerce has always waged war and defended our castle with our powerful IT and security team but will now be introducing new layers of security to better protect our loyal merchants.
- Argo Smart Routing - Content delivered from an AmeriCommerce server relies on the quality of established network paths for consistently fast performance. Traditional and boring networking technologies utilize static routing information that can send content across slow and congested paths. Who wants that, right? Argo Smart Routing reduces Internet latency on average by 35% and connection errors by 27% (now we're talking!). Cloudflare routes 10% of all HTTP/HTTPS Internet traffic providing Argo with real-time intelligence on the true speed of network paths. Argo's smart routing algorithm uses this information to route traffic across the fastest paths available, and maintains open, secure connections to eliminate latency. Think of Argo as Vick's Vapor Rub for a congested server pathway.
- Load Balancing – Some websites get more traffic than others. Issues can arise when sites get overloaded with traffic and share any disk space with sites that may not even be related. The new load balancing service solves these issues by providing Local and global load balancing to reduce latency by balancing traffic across multiple servers. It also provides health checks with fast failover to rapidly route visitors away from failures. This will help prevent servers from reaching maximum capacity and potential downtime. Someone tell Maui, "You're Welcome!"
- Faster DNS (Domain Name System) - We are moving our primary DNS to Cloudflare, who Powers over 38% of managed DNS domains and runs one of the largest authoritative DNS networks in the world (yeah, we're bragging). With an average of a few milliseconds query speed, they have the fastest performance of any managed DNS provider. DNS updates happen within seconds, making DNS propagation delays a thing of the past. On top of that, the DNS is powered by the same network as the lightning-fast CDN. Domains are resolved with the same 119 data centers that cache our users’ content, making it the fastest DNS provider globally. This will allow our users to “go live” faster and allow updates at record speeds.
What Can You Expect? And When?
Our team is already in the process of rolling this out to our awesome users. Some will be automatically upgraded due the nature of their DNS configuration. A few AmeriCommerce users will be prompted by our support team to simply make a change to their DNS. That's it!
Check out the FAQ here if you want to know how your online store will be affected. Until then, be on the lookout for even more news and announcements coming this year through our company newsletter and blog. We're just getting started.
Happy Selling!
-AmeriCommerce Team