How Mecindo Saves On Development Resources With Our Help

Lauge: We used to host our VPS’s on Amazon AWS which gave us a lot of great flexibility and options for customization back then. After an initial tryout phase we deciding to migrate to Cloudways, we quickly realized that we could save a lot of development resources by simply adapting to Cloudways tech stack and have them maintaining the stack.

Cloudways: What was your experience with Cloudways when you first signed up? Please tell us about your first impressions.

Lauge: We were really thrilled first when we started testing out Cloudways. All the settings I used to manage through the SSH terminal was suddenly quickly available through the dashboard, and to be honest we did not miss messing around in the console on da daily basis. Of course the infrastructure has its few limitations such as no autoscaling server instances as we had with EC2 on AWS. But for now the infrastructure on Cloudways has performed exceptionally for our usecases.

Cloudways: In your opinion, what sets us apart from other ecommerce hosting providers? How has our in-built support for PHP-based apps such as WordPress, Laravel, and Magento made matters easier for you?

Lauge: It’s a nice touch that you can spin up a server with a vanilla installation of different applications such as Laravel, Magento, WordPress etc. Just within minutes! It is easy to manage multiple applications running on the same server as well, just working from within the dashboard. All the settings you need to manage your webserver configuration or php.ini settings etc. can be done directly from the UI. This gives you the option to quickly try our different configurations or easily clone a webserver to implement a beta environment for development. The selection of applications available out of the box could be improved a bit in my opinion to support more frameworks , this selection will hopefully grow in the future.

Cloudways: How do you use Cloudways to help your customers have a great online shopping experience?

Lauge: Cloudways has helped our customers indirectly by freeing up time for our developers so we could focus on creating new and improving the existing shopping experiences.

Cloudways: Out of five cloud providers available on Cloudways, which one(s) do you prefer to use and why?

Lauge: Still prefer AWS for production sites due to better located datacenters and more reliant/compliant policy procedures. Vultr or Digital Ocean are fine for any development/beta, as they’re cheaper.

Cloudways: For you, what’s a manageable abandonment rate?

Chris Wharton: Abandonment rates differ for each country and customer segment. If we see major spikes in our abandonment rates, we immediately starts investigating what can be the cause for our customers leaving.

Cloudways: How important of a role do you think fast hosting plays in shopping cart abandonment?

Lauge: As a lot of research has shown fast hosting and load times plays a big role in improving shopping cart abandonment and reducing bounce rates. Fast hosting is of course just one part of the equation. If your hosting is causing you a measurable delay you should probably look for another hosting partner as it will always hold your applications back from reaching a great performance. Besides a quick and reliant hosting the real difference for bigger ecommerce sites comes from how well the application is optimized, if proper caching politics are set up, if the database is well structured and indexed properly, redundant database queries for each request is kept to a minimum etc.

Cloudways: If there were any tips that you wanted to share with other store owners related to cart abandonment, what would they be?

Lauge: Keep it simple, and don’t introduce unnecessary clutter that distracts or annoys your customers from doing their shopping.

Cloudways: What are your plans for the year 2022?

Lauge: Much like every other year, our plans this year are to keep on improving our business and processes while keeping our customers satisfied.