Wwii, Antiques

Military Antique Reseller Navigates Surging Growth and High-Traffic Events with Rackspace Digital Expertise for Magento

SAN ANTONIO – Nov. 11, 2015 – Rackspace® (NYSE: RAX), the #1 managed cloud company, today announced that International Military Antiques (IMA), the world’s leading retailer of pre-1945 military collectibles and antiques, is leveraging Rackspace Managed Cloud to power its Magento ecommerce environment. With the flexibility of Magento, Rackspace Digital practice area expertise and Fanatical Support®, IMA achieves a responsive ecommerce site optimized to scale for traffic spikes associated with the holiday season and television appearances.

Founded in 1981, IMA possesses thousands of military antique items spanning 500 years of world history and has supplied extremely rare original military pieces, including weapons, muskets and swords from the Revolutionary War and uniforms from WWII, to some of the world’s most prominent museums and major Hollywood productions. The company operated strictly as a mail-order business until 2004, when it created its first ecommerce website. As its online presence took off, IMA increasingly experienced growing pains with scalability and integration of other ecommerce tools. In 2010, IMA turned to Rackspace to power its cloud Magento ecommerce site with optimal performance and flexibility. Magento offers customization and seamless integration of digital tools that are integral to IMA’s ecommerce success.

“Magento is the perfect platform for our business model, but with zero technical staff and 99 percent of sales done through online sales marketplaces, we don’t have time to manage everything in-house, ” said Alex Cranmer, VP of International Military Antiques and military antiques expert for the History Channel’s “Pawn Stars.” “Rackspace has been an invaluable asset for IMA because of its deep digital expertise and Fanatical Support. Our team at Rackspace goes above and beyond to help us drive innovation within our site as we grow and stand up to high traffic events like Halloween and Black Friday.”

Rackspace has helped IMA, which has experienced 1000x online growth since launching its first ecommerce site, build out a mobile presence and optimize its responsive Magento website for high traffic events such as the premier of the IMA reality show “Family Guns” on National Geographic. According to IMA, the show generated a 300 percent increase in traffic with as many as 18, 000 concurrent visitors, and the company experienced zero downtime. Similarly, Rackspace works with IMA to prepare its site for the holiday season, in which traffic more than doubles, with as many as 20, 000 unique visitors each day.

“Magento is a powerful, cutting-edge platform, but it can be difficult for customers to use it to its full potential without the necessary expertise required to architect the best environment, ” said Kyle Metcalf, general manager of the Digital practice area at Rackspace. “Our Rackspace Digital practice area experts help customers get the most out of their ecommerce environments, fine-tuning the infrastructure behind the app, so customers like IMA can deliver a seamless, responsive ecommerce experience year-round.”

Rackspace provides specialized hosting for ecommerce and content applications on a variety of platforms, with 24x7x365 support. Experts use platform-specific best practices to help customers architect an ecommerce environment with optimal speed, uptime and reliability.

This year, Rackspace is rated the #1 hosting provider for the Internet Retailer™ Top 1, 000. To learn more about Rackspace Digital solutions, visit .

To learn more about how International Military Antiques uses Rackspace Digital expertise, see the following post on the Rackspace Blog: .

About Rackspace
Rackspace (NYSE: RAX), the #1 managed cloud company, helps businesses tap the power of cloud computing without the challenge and expense of managing complex IT infrastructure and application platforms on their own. Rackspace engineers deliver specialized expertise on top of leading technologies developed by AWS, Microsoft, OpenStack, VMware and others, through a results-obsessed service known as Fanatical Support®. The company has more than 300, 000 customers worldwide, including two-thirds of the FORTUNE 100. Rackspace was named a leader in the 2015 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Enabled Managed Hosting, and has been honored as one of Fortune’s Best Companies to Work For in six of the past eight years. Learn more at www.rackspace.com.

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