As online sales continue to grow, the demand for powerful ecommerce hosting is growing. Even traditional brick-and-mortar retailers are beginning to recognize the potential of online sales. The right hosting provider can help small business owners and established retail chains transition all or part of their business to a successful online solution.
What is Ecommerce Hosting?
A well-managed e-commerce site can serve multiple visitors from anywhere in the world and support daily sales. To increase revenue, e-commerce sites need to stand out among growing competitors and offer unique solutions. A web hosting solution must also provide reliable performance and security to build customer trust and increase sales.
Uptime is very important when it comes to e-commerce solutions. A host that guarantees 99.9% uptime is essential, as downtime can reduce potential sales. A reputable hosting company should also provide technical support to quickly resolve any issues that may arise. It is imperative that you have access to all software and features, including online shopping carts, customer benefit programs, and third-party payment processors.
Therefore, an e-commerce website needs a dedicated server to provide customers with a smooth and better shopping experience.
Why you should use a dedicated server
If you’re a business owner, you’re well aware of the fact that busy seasons lead to increased sales. This also applies to websites. Whether you run an e-commerce store or a marketing website for your brand, you may experience traffic spikes well beyond your typical monthly traffic.
But it’s not enough to just wait for customers to flock to your site. Instead, you should proactively prepare for these traffic spikes. Otherwise, it can strain your server infrastructure, bring your website down, and lead to lost sales and dissatisfied customers.
To prevent this, consider switching to a dedicated server hosting setup. This ensures that your website stays up and running even during the busiest hours, helping you recoup every last dollar your e-commerce website deserves.
What are the advantages of dedicated servers?
Unlike other hosting solutions, dedicated servers are unique to you and not to another company. It works exclusively for you, using all resources to support traffic on your website (or web app). Additionally, dedicated servers can be customized and configured specifically for your business needs based on your technology stack, assets, and audience size.
Here are eight reasons why you should have a dedicated server for your ecommerce website.
1. Deal with increased traffic
Heavy traffic is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, more traffic means more sales. On the other hand, too much traffic can overload your servers, take your website offline, dissatisfy your customers, and hurt your sales.
With dedicated servers, you can build enough capacity to handle bursts of traffic of any size. Unlike shared servers, the CPUs and RAM installed on dedicated servers are reserved exclusively for you.
2. Enable faster transactions
Even if your website doesn’t go offline due to increased traffic, it can take longer to service all requests to your server. Additionally, a slow website prevents visitors from spending as much time on her website, which can lead to more visitors leaving her website without purchasing anything.
With a dedicated server you can always expect the best performance. If the server is properly configured, transactions are processed efficiently.
3. Improved security
Security is essential on e-commerce websites because they handle a lot of sensitive information, from personal information to credit card numbers. A shared server enforces the same basic security settings for all tenants, but provides very little detail. A dedicated server gives you control over every aspect of your hosting environment, from firewalls to backups to software installation.
4. Provide a better user experience
Visitors are more likely to return to your website with a better user experience, which is more likely to result in a sale. A website with a dedicated server not only loads pages and serves requests quickly, but also guarantees virtually 100% uptime, making it a reliable resource for your audience.
5. Improved cost effectiveness
Some websites are choosing to use cloud-based pay-as-you-go solutions to handle traffic spikes. Cloud-based infrastructure can be scaled very quickly as needed. However, that extra power often comes at a wholly unexpected and high cost.
Dedicated servers ensure predictability and all costs are known in advance, making planning and budgeting easier.
6. Boost your SEO
A fast website is a pleasant experience for visitors, and Google and other search engines incorporate load times into their algorithms and tend to rank fast websites higher. High search rankings can do wonders for your business, especially during the peak shopping season.
7. Achieve maximum privacy
Any company that deals with sensitive data must ensure data safety and privacy. Dedicated servers don’t share any components or resources with anyone, so they create the perfect environment to ensure your privacy.
Governments, institutions and healthcare providers tend to rely on dedicated servers for their needs as maintaining privacy is important. So even with regulatory measures like HIPAA, a dedicated server is best.
8. Make sure you have enough storage
Running an e-commerce website means processing and storing many files such as promotional videos, product images, how-to’s, and more. It’s important to have enough space to store all these files, transfer them, and recall them when needed. More importantly, back up everything and trust those backups.
With a dedicated server, you can easily see how much space you’re using and how much free space you have left. The website, archives and backup data can also be split across hard drives so that the server uses only the data necessary for his website operation.
Learn more about dedicated servers for ecommerce websites
Using a dedicated server for your e-commerce website strategy is paramount to ensuring smooth transactions and safe customer data. While this is important for large businesses with growing traffic, it can also benefit small businesses.
Rest assured that no matter how savvy you are in the world of e-commerce, your customers will be well taken care of. Hosting an e-commerce platform on a dedicated server with features such as increased traffic handling capacity, faster transactions, improved security, and a higher level of user experience should be considered by all businesses.
You can also expect to reduce costs over time while further enhancing your regular SEO efforts and ultimately achieving maximum privacy with respect to customer data stored on your servers. If you want to take your ecommerce platform to the next level and serve your customers like never before, a dedicated server is for you. Those may be the answers you were looking for.
Please contact Liquid Web’s sales staff. We will answer all your dedicated server questions and suggest the best option based on your current setup and needs.