Countless eCommerce companies struggle with slow loading speeds, insufficient security, and poorly managed web servers. Choosing a good hosting service for your eCommerce business can either make or break the business in each of these areas, depending on what you choose.
This is part 1 of a multi-part blog series on eCommerce cloud hosting services. This initial introductory article will discuss options for cloud hosting services and the business scenarios accompanying each.
Why It’s Crucial to Choose the Right Cloud Hosting Service
Running an eCommerce website means you need to store and manage large amounts of content. Companies offering hosting services can vary quite a bit. To benefit your business, it’s crucial to choose carefully.
Some of the problems you may run into with the wrong hosting provider include:
A Slow Website
There are several reasons why a slow website will cramp your style. First, a slow site means a bad user experience. Today, 47% of consumers expect a page load speed of less than two seconds and will quickly bounce from your site if things take too long. Another reason to worry about site speed is that it’s becoming an increasingly important factor from an SEO perspective. If your user experience is not top-notch and your load speed is bad, Google simply won’t rank your content as high as you want.
Insufficient Security
Trust is one of the most critical factors in online sales. Anyone can start an eCommerce site, but to grow and thrive, a business must implement proper security measures to protect its customers. And if your site is perceived as unsafe by browsers, consumers will be advised against visiting it.
According to Accenture, there was a 67% increase in security breaches in the last five years. And eCommerce websites are particularly vulnerable for a number of reasons:
- Many keep hold of customers’ sensitive information that could be used for identity theft.
- They may store their customers’ payment information—a goldmine for hackers.
- They may process financial transitions, which is an opportunity for stealing data.
- Some may have valuable intellectual property worth more than customer information.
It is imperative to choose a hosting service that offers encryption and rigorous security protocols to minimize risk and maximize customer trust.
An Unstable Website
Downtime is expensive, and if it’s not possible to access your site, your ability to do business stops. And if this happens repeatedly, it can additionally affect people’s trust in your store.
Unplanned downtime due to a bad web host is a threat to your business’ existence and a risk not to be taken lightly. Most eCommerce hosting services will guarantee a level of uptime, but it’s best to research providers, compare options, and choose one that best fits your needs. Be thorough—look for customer reviews, ask other users, and ultimately, do your best to learn how your website would be secured by whomever you choose.
Difficulties When You Need to Scale
Ecommerce is rarely linear but is more often characterized by slow periods and sudden, high surges in demand. For example, Christmas sale, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday are periods with huge revenue potential for retail and eCommerce companies. For some businesses, the number of transactions in one single day can be equivalent to many weeks. But managing these peaks can be challenging, and with the wrong hosting company, the potential feast can quickly turn into a disaster, like when Walmart’s website crashed because of PS5 orders. Each passing minute translated to lost sales and disgruntled customers.
Related reading: Digital roadmap: Building a Digital Strategy Roadmap–An Introduction
Benefits of Cloud Hosting for Enterprise Ecommerce
To manage the challenges discussed above, an increasing number of eCommerce businesses are opting for cloud-based hosting solutions. The benefits of hosting your eCommerce website in the cloud are numerous, and below we’ll cover some of our top points on which ones we consider most important.
Endless Scalability
Scalability is one of the most significant benefits of cloud-hosted eCommerce platforms. With cloud hosting, you can add or reduce capacity in relation to your requirements, and you never risk building yourself into a corner with too little bandwidth. You pay only for what you use and can quickly adapt your hosting solution to your needs.
Improved Reliability
Corrupt or defective software, hard-drive crashes, and power surges can have disastrous repercussions for an on-prem solution and basically wipe out all your data. This is not the case with a cloud-based eCommerce platform since cloud-based storage provides a different level of data control and backup options.
Cost-Efficient
Price is one of the most important perks of cloud-based eCommerce hosting. Since you only pay for what you use, you’re optimizing your resources. And when your business grows, it’s easy to upgrade your solution in increments, without large, up-front investments.
Hybrid Kubernetes Cloud Solutions for Enterprise eCommerce
Some eCommerce businesses require on-premise data and need code storage in their own data center, but still want the benefits of outsourced technology and a fully managed platform. Those companies are often best served by a hybrid cloud solution.
With a hybrid solution, the essential components of the platform are kept in the client’s data center to satisfy internal security demands. That database is then complemented with cloud services. These hybrid solutions can be stored in any data center, anywhere, as long as there is a stable internet connection.
Kubernetes, Microservices, and Containers Behind the Scenes
For an eCommerce platform, a microservice architecture offers many benefits. By breaking applications and tasks down into smaller pieces, DevOps can segment functionality to optimize the development and testing processes.
From a development perspective, this means that teams can work on different parts of the code without interfering with each other. For example, on an eCommerce site, this can mean that product search, customer support, and shopping cart can all be built as separate microservices.
Packaging microservices in so-called containers means they can then be deployed on any platform or cloud. This brings a level of agility that is important for eCommerce companies who want to switch between cloud providers. Kubernetes is an excellent tool for container orchestration and an effective solution for scaling up and down resources.
How Vaimo Can Help
At Vaimo, our team has a unique level of experience, having developed three generations of cloud and on-premise platforms.
If you’re looking for advice, a technical or security audit, or if you need a partner to help you with hosting solutions, our team of experts is here for you.
Below are some of the benefits of partnering with Vaimo to host your enterprise eCommerce business:
- A COMPLETE IN-HOUSE TEAM: You benefit from having our hosting, security, developer, and system administration teams all under the same roof.
- PROACTIVE MONITORING: We monitor our systems 24/7 and are alerted if there is an issue. If your website becomes unavailable, we act to resolve it immediately.
- HIGHLY SCALABLE: Our data center is built with high scalability to ensure your website can handle both planned and unplanned surges in traffic.
- AUTOMATED DEPLOYMENTS: Our integrated deployment tool (developed specifically for the Magento platform by our team) automates the entire workflow from Development to Production.
- HIGH AVAILABILITY: We configure automatic redundancy that allows your site to recover speedily and continue running as if nothing ever happened.
- PROACTIVE SECURITY: We focus on proactive security to avoid security breaches to your online store. Our comprehensive IT security policies and processes are reviewed regularly.
- A DECADE OF MAGENTO/ADOBE COMMERCE HOSTING EXPERIENCE: As an Adobe Platinum Partner, we have a decade of experience hosting both B2C and B2B clients on the Magento/Adobe Commerce platform.
- HELP ON STANDBY: You get 24/7 support through an application SLA and full-stack support for anything that may go awry.
If reading through the above sparks any questions that you’d like us to answer, let’s chat.
