And just this week Internet Retailer rolled out the Hot 100 list for 2013, and Rackspace is thrilled to see so many of our e-retailers recognized for their innovative efforts.

The Hot 100 list recognizes sites that can help drive new ideas and lessons to the industry and other e-commerce sites. Internet Retailer creates the list using quantitative research and qualitative analysis to determine which sites are driving innovation.  Internet Retailer names 100 e-commerce sites along with 10 mobile commerce sites that are pushing the envelope and evolving to meet the needs of their customers.

Don Davis, Internet Retailers’ editor, published a great overview of how the nomination process works and how it comprises the final list, which features up and comers and established e-retailers who are keeping it current.

Rackspace supports 11 of these e-commerce and mobile sites names to the Hot 100 – more than any other hosting provider! Some of those customers include Karmaloop, Threadless and Warby Parker, who were recognized for leveraging the social community to help influence products and drive sales.

Thank you Internet Retailer for recognizing Rackspace as this year’s No. 1 hosting provider for the IR 1000 and for the Hot 100 list!

Rackspace has been involved in the strategic planning and key decisions with many of these customers to help ensure their success through reliability and scalability, which are critical components to an ecommerce site’s success.  It is a privilege for us to support these businesses’ overall visions and serve as an extension of their teams.

Congratulations to all the sites named on the Hot 100 list this year, and a special shout-out to our Rackspace e-retailers! Keep pushing the envelope and thank you for allowing us to be a part of it!

AmeriCommerce is an award winning full service e-commerce software provider and a Rackspace e-commerce partner. Here, AmeriCommerce IT Director David Blount discusses the importance of pre-planning with your hosting provider before the holiday season.

Online merchants often see their tech infrastructure as a “set it and forget it” part of their online business. This is especially true of merchants with hosted solutions like our e-commerce software running here at Rackspace.

For low volume, low traffic ecommerce sites, it is usually best to rely upon the infrastructure your SaaS solution is operating on and not stress on those details. However, for larger merchants that actively drive their online sales and create big traffic spikes, we recommend a close relationship with your e-commerce software and infrastructure team – especially during large promotion and marketing pushes during the holidays.

To illustrate how this looks, the following two situations show how our AmeriCommerce customers, along with us and our team at Rackspace, have used pre-planning and open lines of communication to support big sales initiatives during large traffic spikes.

3 Million Emails in 1 Week and Up to 10x Traffic Spike
One of our merchants is deeply rooted in the crafts niche market and has a large community around their many blogs in that space. These blogs have fostered a large and ever growing mailing list. This merchant sends email campaigns on a regular basis and due to their list size; they can create up to 10 times their normal traffic patterns.

In preparation, this merchant works with us well before the 3 million-plus email campaign begins. This ensures we have proper server resources in place to meet the demands of the promotion. In addition, we have worked with Rackspace to create a private cloud solution to be able to give the client additional resources by load balancing between their server and the VM server during these campaigns. By pre-planning we are able to incur huge traffic spikes without any performance or reliability hits resulting in a great promotion and high revenues.

12,000 Coupon Codes Required for Promotion
In this instance, the merchant was gearing up for its first large promotion since establishing its store on our e-commerce software. This promotion included a bulk import of 12,000 coupon codes for specific customers to claim for a one-time purchase.

In preparation, this merchant sent us the 12,000 coupon codes and we ran it through our test environment and quickly found out there would be performance hits to the store cart processes. With the results of this test, we included the development team and optimized the source code that handled coupon codes. By pre-planning with us and testing before sending out these coupon codes we were able to set this campaign up for success.

30 Percent Server Utilization and Continual Planning
Years ago, we moved our hosted ecommerce software to Rackspace. During this transition we outlined our objectives and needs, and set in motion an expectation of stability and performance. One key decision we made for the health of our infrastructure and to the benefit of our merchants was to keep our average resource utilization below 30 percent. This means ongoing upgrades of network appliances and continually expanding our environment in order to stay below 30 percent utilization.

In preparation for the holidays we review our year over year trends and maintain a watchful eye on all our systems, servers and KPIs. We ramp up quickly and don’t hesitate to rely upon the wisdom of Rackspace staff. In this same way, our platform also continually improves and we are constantly planning and implementing new features to better equip our merchants and their online sales efforts.

Here is a brief list of things you might spot check as you prepare for the holiday season.

1. Do you have the contact information and account information of your infrastructure team?
2. Are you finished with any major site initiatives (redesign, re-architecture, new product imports, new servers) and will they impact your holiday initiatives?
3. Have you corrected any past reliability or infrastructure issues to ensure success this holiday?
4. Have you planned for server resources and bandwidth needs?
5. Have you made any significant changes (new code, new servers or perhaps even new site features or third party integrations) since your last big push that may impact your holiday season?

For more on the upcoming holiday shopping season, check out this infographic showcasing the results of our National Online Survey of E-Retailers.

Gorilla Group, an award-wining e-commerce solutions provider and Rackspace partner, wants to ensure you have a successful holiday season. Here, Igor Rafalovsky, Director of Technology at Gorilla, shares ideas gained over his 15 years of IT Management experience on how to prepare for the holidays by reducing infrastructure-related risks associated with single points of failure.

It is very important to have enough server capacity to handle the onslaught of holiday shoppers. Many online retailers move to larger servers with more memory and CPUs to prepare in advance for Black Friday.  But what if hardware failure or software glitches bring down the server that your online store runs on?  Do you have a plan to quickly restore your services when every minute of downtime translates into a huge loss of revenue? Beyond the initial impact, damaging customer trust can have long term effects on your business.

Large Internet retailers rely on the concept of High Availability (HA) to keep their stores open in the face of unexpected glitches and malfunctions.  The HA concept is quite simple and is based on eliminating as many single points of failure as possible within a reasonable budget.

The simplest HA approach is to ensure a redundant infrastructure. This means your server has at least two network connections, two power supplies connected to different electrical circuits and two mirrored hard drives to prevent data loss if one of them suddenly crashes. The server itself is still a single point of failure though, and if it crashes, so does your online revenue.

To safeguard against this, Gorilla Group recommends a multi-server configuration for an optimally performing online store. While there are additional costs and more complexity in setting up this HA solution, it’s definitely worth it.

In this setup, your hosting provider can arrange a pair of redundant firewalls with two network connections to the Internet, redundant load balancers to direct traffic to multiple web servers and replicated database servers to handle the traffic load.  When set up properly, this HA architecture can eliminate virtually every single point of failure within the online store.  Together with a solid data backup strategy, the multi-server HA approach will reduce your infrastructure-related risks, keep your site up and ensure your shoppers are satisfied.

And during the holiday crunch, that becomes increasingly more important.

This holiday season, online sales are predicted to grow 12 percent compared to last year – that could push online holiday sales to as much as $96 billion. Retailers should be eager and also prepared for what is in store. Online retailers are estimated to see almost a third of their business in just the fourth quarter, driven mostly by holiday sales.

Meanwhile, recent research shows that three-second page load times can lead 40 percent of customers to abandon a website, and 79 percent of shoppers who are dissatisfied with website performance are less likely to buy from the same site again.  All this can lead to lost dollars and damage to your brand.

There has been more e-commerce innovation in the past year than during the last decade, according to Techcrunch; and that innovation means web sites must perform at the top of their game if they expect to earn consumers’ holiday dollars.

Do you have an omni-channel plan in place?

Here at Rackspace, we work closely with our partners and retailers to help ensure a prosperous holiday season. Here are five tips to ensure your e-commerce site is ready to handle the holiday shopping scramble and that it performs at its peak potential:

1. Pre-plan with your hosting provider: This is incredibly important.  Communication with your hosting provider should be the foundation of your online strategy. Let us know your plans! Are you doubling your product SKUs this quarter? Are you running social media campaigns that could quadruple your traffic? Congratulations – we’re excited for you! Now let’s review your environment to make sure it can handle your anticipated plans and that traffic that is sure to follow. The last thing any of us want is for you not to see a return on your investment at the most critical time.
2. Optimization through configuration: By taking a close look at your environment, we can help you identify different ways for you to maximize and optimize your infrastructure. Leveraging a content delivery network (CDN) like Rackspace Cloud Files for file or media storage allows you to cache content at global edge locations, saving users time. This is a huge help for your page load times. We can help with database tuning and look at your infrastructure to make sure it’s optimized for full performance. There are a lot of tweaks that can boost your site’s overall performance to delight your customers. We can help you make them.
3. Identify single points of failure: It’s important to know where your vulnerabilities lie. Should you add for high availability (HA)? Do you have a failover strategy? These are important questions that online retailers have to evaluate as they consider the opportunity cost. We can provide guidance and talk through different options leveraging our full portfolio.
4. Enable dynamic scaling within the app tier: Immediate scaling is not always possible, even in a cloud environment. While technology improves daily, it depends a lot on the application, which may take additional development to enable dynamic scaling. We can provide guidance and have videos that share best practices.
5. Load test, load test, load test: You invest a ton to make your site the best it can be and to provide a great user experience. Let’s make sure you can handle the traffic so people can see it! Through our professional services, we can help provide load testing – whether it’s the whole site or just a specific part. We have customers who do this quarterly and those who do it annually, right before the start of their peak season. We can enable synthetic transaction monitoring to make sure your site experience is where it should be. If you’ve been on the fence about it; it’s not too late!

For more information on how to get the best out of your e-commerce site, contact us. We’ll make sure you’re up to speed and ready for record sales this holiday season.

And stay tuned, because each week leading up to the holidays we plan to feature guest blog posts from our e-commerce partners in which they delve deeper into the these five tips, provide examples and share best practices.

Season’s greetings!