When it comes to web hosting, one size can never fit all. Every website is unique and has specific hosting requirements. Even if we were to categorize them by industry, a social media platform would have different hosting needs as compared to a blog or an e-commerce platform. Today, we are here to talk about e-commerce websites, and the kind of hosting that can suit their requirements.
In the current digital world, the online marketplace is highly competitive. Therefore, running an e-commerce website is difficult. You need to ensure that the products offered on your site are of the best quality, have competitive prices, and ensure that you offer the best service and interact with your customers regularly. If this was not enough, you also need to ensure that the website itself performs in sync with people’s expectations. As an e-commerce site owner, the security, speed, and reliability of the website hosting service are of paramount importance to you.
Cloud Hosting has evolved as a preferred hosting service for many e-commerce websites for the reasons mentioned below:
- Traffic spike management
All websites have days when traffic spikes put a strain on the available resources and threaten to hamper the performance of the site. With an e-commerce website, these instances are more regular. With hundreds of products listed, predicting which one will catch the fancy of the online community is impossible to predict. One social media post going viral is all it takes to bring thousands of visitors knocking on the doors of your website. While this is good news, if you cannot ensure uninterrupted services to each visitor, the few minutes of fame can backfire and cause a lot of damage to the reputation of your site. Hence, you need a hosting service that can manage traffic spikes efficiently. Most Cloud Hosting Providers offer instant resource scalability allowing you to manage these spikes with ease.
- Security & data redundancy
An e-commerce site collects and uses a lot of data. You can identify buying trends, user behaviour, and several other factors that can help you improve your business. Also, with people buying products, you store a lot of sensitive data [personally identifiable information, bank/credit card details, etc.]. Hence, security is an important aspect of an e-commerce site. The ideal hosting service for such a platform should have the best security reviews and data redundancy to safeguard against any data loss.
Cloud Hosting is known to be more secure than most traditional hosting systems by virtue of its design. Also, most providers use redundant storage systems (for example, Ceph) to ensure that there is always a working copy of your website available. This helps you ensure uninterrupted services even if there is a security breach.
- Cost-efficiency
The price of the hosting service plays an important role in determining its feasibility. Web hosting is a recurring cost and needs to be cost-efficient too.
Cloud Hosting is not the cheapest hosting service but is more cost-efficient than any traditional plans. You can start with minimal resources and use the cost-scalability feature to scale up as your business grows.
- Site Speed
Needless to say, an e-commerce website needs to have super-sonic speeds. With thousands of images to be displayed and a low attention span of online users, a slow-loading e-commerce website is destined to fail. Hence, the hosting service must guarantee fast page-loading speeds.
Most Cloud Hosting providers use a CDN and/or a caching solution like Varnish to boost the speed of your site by up to 1000x!
Summing Up
As seen above, Cloud Hosting fulfils most of the hosting requirements of an e-commerce website. However, as we said earlier, every website is unique. Hence, before migrating to a Cloud Hosting service, assess the needs of your website, and find the perfect hosting service for it. While Cloud Hosting is highly trustworthy, ensure that your site’s requirements are met. Good Luck!
