Esc Navindexer

Why are plans limited by number of product variants/collections?

In order to provide super-fast browsing and enhanced filtering system, we need to store all of your product variants and collections in an index (essentially our copy of your product database). The amount of data we need to store scales with the number of variants, multiplied by the number of collections.

Storing more data about your store affects two things:

• The cost to host all of that data in a high-performance database increases.
• The amount of processing power required to crunch all the numbers increases.

So the plans have limits relative to our hosting and processing costs.

What if my shop doesn’t have many collections?

We’ve tried to balance our plans around sites with a normal distribution of variants to collections. However, some sites are structured a bit differently. For example:

• A site with a very low number of collections, but many product variants, or
• A site with a very low number of product variants, but many collections

By ‘very low’, we mean less than a quarter of the max available on your plan.

If this sounds like your shop, get in touch and we may be able to offer you a custom plan.

What is the stability/performance like?

Esc Navindexer runs on Amazon Web Services EC2, the industry standard in application hosting. The app is hosted across multiple regions and availablility zones (AZs), meaning even if a datacenter goes down the your site stay up.

Esc Navindexer splits it's workload between two groups of servers. One of these are the 'workers' - which index your site and keep the app up to date. The other group are the 'render servers' - these take requests from your visitors to filter and retrieve products.

The two groups are completely seperated, meaning even if our worker servers have issues, the servers which serve up your site will continue running. If the render server used by your site fails, requests are automatically re-routed to a healthy server within a matter of minutes, minimising downtime.

Performance is absolutely critical to us, and we ensure all sites are given enough resources to me responsive and feel fast. We aim to keep all requests under 500ms, with the average being closer to 100ms, even if this means dedicating extra hardware to bigger shops.

What happens if my shop goes over the variant/collection limit of my plan?

If your shop happens to go over your plan limits, we will not be able to provide the indexing service to your store. This means your index-powered collections will not be available.

However we won’t disable your indexer immediately. As long as you haven’t gone over the limit by more than double, we will give you a 24-hour grace period in which we will email you and ask that you either hide some of your variants/collections, or upgrade your plan.

If you’re on our largest plan, we’ll give you a one-week grace period in which we’ll get in touch with you to discuss moving your shop to one of our enterprise plans.

If you need more time to think, get in touch with us and we may extend the grace period as a measure of good will. We reserve the right to not do this in cases where we feel the performance impact or cost of continuing to index your store is too high.