Hypernode’s Affordable Magento, Shopware, and Akeneo Hosting: Built to Meet the Ecommerce Needs of Today and Tomorrow

TL; DR: Hypernode, a cutting-edge ecommerce cloud hosting platform for Magento, Shopware, and Akeneo, provides users with a highly secure and performant environment for online shops. The Netherlands-based company is on a mission to make its customers’ ecommerce stores faster and more secure while cutting development time. Hypernode’s automated scaling solutions, intuitive user interface, and enthusiastic approach to continuous development make the platform an appropriate choice for SMBs and enterprise customers of all shapes and sizes.

The day after Thanksgiving, also known as Black Friday, has long been one of the busiest shopping events of the year.

Philadelphia traffic police coined the phrase in the ‘60s to describe the miserable task of managing increased pedestrian and vehicular traffic on that day. But while the event proves troublesome for those managing crowds, it has traditionally served as a bright spot for the retail industry, in some cases accounting for 20% of annual sales between brick-and-mortar and ecommerce channels.

Last year, in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, that sales dynamic quickly shifted.

“Usually, we see peak ecommerce sales around the end of the year and specifically on Black Friday,” said Sanne Bolkenstein, Commercial Manager at Hypernode. “But for about three months since the lockdowns in mid-March of last year, every day was as busy as Black Friday.”

No ecommerce retailers could have anticipated Black Friday-like demand in Spring of 2020. Fortunately for Hypernode customers, adjusting to the change was surprisingly simple: They didn’t have to deal with anything other than a few upgrades to server resources.

“We don’t like to boast, but our platform is built for growth, so our customers didn’t experience much change other than some server upgrades — and we had the resources readily available,” Sanne said. “We had no outages, no problems, no disruptions of service whatsoever despite significant increases in traffic. We’ve always said that our platform is built for growth — this was trial by fire.”

The Netherlands-based company is now continuing its mission to diversify ecommerce by providing SMBs and enterprises alike with a managed cloud platform built to fulfill their changing needs.

Hypernode, part of team.blue, is one of the leading managed hosting providers in the Netherlands. Byte initially created Hypernode to help development agencies and systems integrators build and operate secure Magento shops in the Dutch market.

“We noticed that there wasn’t a lot of competition in terms of highly specified but affordable Magento hosting,” Sanne said. “The choices were between unspecialized hosting that is relatively cheap or a high-end, specialized hosting solution that requires quite an extensive budget.”

By 2018, Hypernode had successfully filled the hole in the Netherlands market for affordable, specified Magento hosting and began to pursue growth internationally. To do so, the company embraced bilingual support, extended its operating hours, and introduced new payment methods.

“We had to work hard on finding ambassadors and building a brand abroad,” Sanne said. “But we now have a substantial amount of international customers, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive.”

Sanne pointed out that Hypernode’s tagline — The Last E-commerce Hosting Platform You’ll Ever Need — captures the company’s value proposition quite succinctly. That’s because the team regularly provides security patches, performance upgrades, and new features via continuous integration and delivery.

“Because we have this high level of standardization and automation, we can roll out new features every week,” she said. “This means that you’re constantly running on the latest software versions, the latest security updates, and the newest features. The platform evolves around our customers’ needs and wishes.”

The ongoing shortage of skilled workers worldwide has made hiring tech talent a challenging and expensive prospect. Researchers predict that 85 million jobs worldwide could go unfilled by 2030 due to the talent crunch. If this shortage persists in the U.S. tech industry, the country could lose out on $162 billion worth of annual revenue per year.

To make matters worse, employee turnover in the U.S. IT industry has reached 13.2%, with employers often forced to pay 50 to 250% of the previous employee’s salary to find a replacement.

“We all know that developers are scarce, and their time is even more scarce — so you don’t want them to spend it on repetitive tasks,” Sanne said. “We’ve automated so much on the platform to allow developers to focus on their core competencies. We take care of the rest.”

This includes setting up infrastructure, installing and updating software, fixing security issues, and troubleshooting server problems, among other DevOps tasks. Without worrying about configuring or tuning a web stack, developers have more time building new features and formulating innovative solutions.

“An investment in Hypernode is an investment in your future growth,” Sanne told us. “Because our highly advanced hosting platform is standardized, we offer all the customizations and features on every plan. So you can start with a lower plan and scale thanks to our underlying configurations.”

From high-performance SSDs and an advanced software stack to robust security and support, Hypernode is already a value-rich solution.

But since we last caught up with the company, it’s added a convenient and straightforward interface for managing hosting environments. The solution allows customers to create and manage multiple SSH users and keys, create instant backups, tackle PHP version management, and enable built-in caching to boost performance.

“We have all these different roles,” Sanne said. “You, as a customer, have total control over your hypernodes, but you can also assign access to developers or to agencies that you work with. And as an agency, you have your own overview of all the hypernodes in your control.”

Through its agency program, Hypernode offers agencies a progressive recurring commission that is available at a glance through the browser-based control panel.

“Agencies can view a progress bar to easily visualize their progress,” Sanne told us. “We thought hard about integrating features that are interesting for our customers and the agencies that we work with. For instance, we’ve also integrated server metrics into the control panel after observing a higher emphasis on monitoring and alerting than ever before.”

Hypernode is known for listening closely to what customers want and determining appropriate priorities for internal development. The company allows customers to directly influence Hypernode’s road map by contributing to an online feedback repository.

“We listen to what our customers want and need when it comes to determining priorities for our road map,” Sanne said.

The Hypernode team has big plans for the future of the platform. “For instance, we’re integrating our Dutch customer interface with our international one, which will make it much easier for us to maintain our internal systems.”

The company is also adding features to enhance flexibility in terms of scaling up or down.
“You can schedule based on demand — so you can say, ‘From 11 p.m. to midnight, upgrade to this plan, and then three days later, go back. All of it is automated; you don’t have to be awake in the middle of the night to push a button.”