Web Controls – What Are They and Why Should you Care?

This month’s featured partner blog offers an inside look at Web Controls from our trusted partners at Webscale. Webscale provides cloud automation and managed hosting solutions for retailers across any platform. Their team focuses on optimizing UX across all stages of the customer journey by implementing innovative experience enhancements such as web controls.

Getting Started

Every eCommerce storefront, in fact, every website, needs an intelligent visibility tool that provides insight into the health of the web application, and subsequently the health of the digital business overall. While there are many tools that will accomplish some of these goals, like Google Analytics, few offer a comprehensive view of a website’s infrastructure, its traffic, and overall user experience.

It’s why we developed the Webscale Customer Portal, and why we bundle it with every hosting and management plan we offer. It delivers an integrated view of your digital commerce application – site infrastructure, logs, traffic, security posture, cyber threats, good and bad actors/bots, availability, performance, user experience, and more – through a single pane of glass. It allows eCommerce site owners to monitor and proactively influence application behavior in real-time, and more importantly, it ensures business owners are making strategic decisions based on accurate data.

Web Controls

But while the “whole may be greater than the sum of its parts”, there are some very important parts of the portal that truly differentiate it, and Webscale, from competitive offerings and from traditional hosting providers. Enter Web Controls! Web Controls provide a powerful and flexible way of setting up unlimited custom rules that define how to handle web traffic and the nature of your site’s response to specific behavioral patterns. It is a limitless custom rules engine that enables merchants to accomplish and automate many ongoing tasks like re-directs and security protocols. Web Controls were designed such that anyone, at any skill level, can set them up, negating the need for specialized personnel to create large quantities of custom code to ensure the high availability, enterprise-grade security, and fast performance of their web applications.

For example, Web Controls can be used to re-direct scraper bot traffic to an alternate backend or allow traffic from different geographies to see different kinds of content, languages, or even currencies, without having to run multiple backends with localized domains, like customer.co.uk for UK customers. Web Controls enable site administrators to capture business intent and use that information to create simple rules within the management portal. They can also create the equivalent of firewall rules, negating the need for the user to have a deep technical understanding of how to build them. Web Controls enable site admins to use pre-defined, pre-tested security rule sets based on their digital commerce application, minimizing the need to discover, define, and maintain the rules themselves.

Benefits

With Web Controls, merchants can:

• Gain visibility and insight into every aspect of their site’s infrastructure through one application.
• Quickly, easily identify issues or trends, make decisions, and implement controls that improve their site’s availability, security, and performance, without a deep technical background.
• Blocking individual requests for a specified duration.
• Blocking all traffic from a specific country, if you don’t want to do business with potential customers from that country, or just blocking traffic that has a particular referring source.
• Rate-limiting resource-intensive user sessions to mitigate their impact on the overall application performance, and much more.

About Webscale

Webscale is the hosting platform of choice for over 3000 eCommerce storefronts, including brands such as Dollar General, Alex and Ani, Unilever/Murad, Regal Cinemas, and more. And, as a SaaS-delivered solution, the daily learnings across all these businesses are leveraged to consistently maintain flawless performance across every eCommerce application we manage.

Whether it’s an exposed security risk that needs to be virtually patched or a performance issue with a cloud region, our customers can rest easy knowing they are always available, always fast, and always secure.

If you’d like to learn more, download our Technology Differentiators whitepaper here, or drop us an email to info@webscale.com, and one of our eCommerce specialists will be in touch.