Spalding

Established by Boston Red Stockings pitcher A.G. Spalding in 1876, Spalding has long been a leader of innovation and quality in the sporting goods category.

From the development of the very first basketball to the latest in NEVERFLAT technology, Spalding’s tradition of innovation continues.

When Spalding began to have problems with their hosting environment due to its outdated nature, they needed assistance correctly moving their website and wanted to upgrade their infrastructure at the same time.

Genacom performed a migration of their entire system to a more robust architecture and increased performance and lowered their overall operating budget by making adjustments to the infrastructure which increased efficiency.

The situation

Spalding's website had outgrown its hosting environment. The infrastructure was outdated, the site had become unreliable, and the vendor could not offer a path forward that did not involve downtime and risk. Spalding needed to move the entire site to a modern platform, upgrade the infrastructure at the same time, and do both without losing data, breaking integrations or interrupting a brand that consumers and retailers visit every day.

What Genacom did

Genacom planned and executed the migration as a managed project. The existing environment was fully documented and backed up, a new architecture was built on current infrastructure with capacity for growth, and the site was moved in stages with every component tested on the new platform before traffic was switched. Configuration was tuned for the new environment so that the same site ran faster and cost less to operate. After cutover the site moved onto Genacom's website management plan, with the backup and asset-protection layer that Spalding would later put to the test.

The results

Spalding reported the outcomes on this page: a successful migration onto a new technology platform, newly upgraded infrastructure without any issues during the process, and a 48 percent increase in performance when the work was complete. Operating costs fell because the new configuration used resources more efficiently. The lasting result showed up later, when Spalding needed a restore: "The staff at Genacom has by far been the best backup service we've used, when we needed to restore they did it all."

What it shows

A migration is only half the job. The other half is the plan that follows it: daily offsite backups, tested restores, monitoring and a team that answers when something goes wrong. Genacom's asset-protection layer is included in every nTier plan for exactly this reason, and the Spalding restore is the clearest example of why it matters to a brand that cannot afford to be offline.

Services involved

Website management, migration services, infrastructure upgrade, performance tuning, backup and asset protection. Read about managed hosting and infrastructure and the backup and disaster recovery guide, or book a strategy call before your next migration.

How the migration was run

Genacom treated the move as a full infrastructure project rather than a file transfer. Discovery documented every component of the existing environment: the application and its dependencies, the database, the integrations, the DNS and email configuration and the scheduled jobs that ran behind the scenes. A complete backup was taken and verified before anything changed. The new architecture was built on current infrastructure with monitoring, backups and a staging environment from the start, and a copy of the site was brought up on it for testing while the old environment kept serving traffic. Performance tuning happened on the copy, where configuration could be changed and measured safely. Cutover was scheduled for a low-traffic window, DNS was moved with a short time-to-live so any issue could be reversed in minutes, and the team watched the new environment through the first full day of traffic before declaring the migration complete.

Why the backup mattered later

Every nTier plan includes daily offsite backups with tested restores, and the Spalding account is the reason Genacom talks about that so plainly. When Spalding needed a restore, the backups were current, complete and already proven to work, so the recovery was a routine operation rather than an emergency. That is the standard for every managed site: backups that are taken every day, stored away from the production environment, restored on a schedule to prove they work, and documented so any Genacom engineer can run the recovery. It is the least visible part of website management until the day it is the only part that matters.

What the move to managed hosting includes today

The Spalding migration is the template for how Genacom moves a site onto its managed hosting now. Discovery documents the existing environment down to the scheduled jobs and email configuration. A verified backup is taken before anything changes. The new environment is built and tested alongside the old one, the site is moved during a window the client approves, and DNS is switched only after the new environment has been checked page by page. After launch the site is on the same footing as every other managed site: hardened servers that Genacom patches, a web application firewall, daily offsite backups with tested restores, 24/7 monitoring, and a named engineer who knows the stack.

Why a brand chooses one provider for hosting and management

Spalding could have kept hosting in one place and maintenance in another. Choosing one accountable team removed the gap where problems usually hide, the moment when the host blames the application and the developer blames the server. With Genacom responsible for both, an outage, a security event or a performance regression has one owner and one response, which is the arrangement every nTier plan offers.