IT’Sugar is Sweet on Webscale’s Expertise

“They’re quite helpful,” declared Steve Parris, Vice President of IT for IT’Sugar, a national confectionery retailer, when asked about Webscale. “They really know us.”

For the past five years, IT’Sugar has hosted its flagship website, itsugar.com, at Webscale Stratus. “Ever since we first launched with Magento 1, we’ve hosted with Webscale Stratus,” said Parris. “The big reason we stay with Webscale Stratus is that they bring to the table known customer solutions for whatever issues Magento may have, whether they’re a bug in the platform or simply an improvement in performance.”

In 2020, Parris noticed a tremendous increase in “carding” attempts on the website – thousands of attempts to use their website to test the validity of possibly stolen credit card numbers. The added traffic greatly affected the server by loading the system and taking advantage of a flaw in Magento 2 (this flaw has since been addressed).

To help Parris combat this onslaught of bogus orders coming from a wide variety of ever-changing IP addresses, Webscale support installed an “autobahn” tool that monitors the Nginx logs to match valid customers against bogus ones and automatically filter the bad IP addresses. After the pro-active action by Webscale’s support team, Parris said traffic dropped back down to normal levels. Webscale Stratus did not charge IT’Sugar for their time in implementing this feature, either as Webscale believes they should do whatever it takes to ensure their customers’ Magento stores are delivered efficiently from a hosting perspective. It’s just part of the normal service.

Parris agrees, “Webscale Stratus is really quite patient with us, and their response time is very good.” He added, “There are probably more ways to leverage Webscale’s Magento expertise than I’m using.”

Beyond the itsugar.com website, Parris and his team also manage the Magento installations for oreo.com and sourpatchkids.com. “We offered to take these iconic branded sites on because we can trust Webcale’s hosting to perform as needed.”