While physical stores are far from becoming obsolete, e-commerce has seen an even higher growth in the first half of 2020 compared to the already ascending rise of online retail. If you have an e-commerce business, you’re probably thinking how to gain new customers amongst the fierce competition and how to improve your website’s features and design. But are you also focusing on your website’s high availability and server uptime?
Many online businesses fail due to slow loading websites, lack of server resources, or poor security. If you want to avoid losing customers to your competitors, you should spend some time on your server infrastructure as slow loading times and security issues will deter possible customers. This infographic further details how to select a serve type and specs based on your use – a selection that should be made well ahead of the busy online holiday shopping period:
Server Specs for Online Retail Businesses
Let’s take a look at which server will suit your business. The global web hosting services market size was valued at USD 56.7 billion in 2019 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 15.5% from 2020 to 2027. Why this growth?
Web hosting services allow both individuals and companies to host their online presence through various types of servers. As e-commerce websites receive higher and higher volumes of data and users’ expectations change, websites, web applications and their supporting infrastructure must be robust and efficient. Businesses that base their commercial activities online should take note of this, since:
• 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.
• Slow page load speed times can increase your cart abandonment rate by 75%.
• A one-second delay in page load time can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.
According to Magento’s 2020 customer research, three of the four crucial online store features are related to their behind-the-scenes infrastructure:
• For 53% of respondents, an easy to use website is crucial
• 37% of shoppers mentioned website load time as essential
• 36% responded the items in stock are most important
• 29% said the online store should load well on a smartphone
There are several servers you can choose from for your e-commerce business: you could choose between a shared server, a VPS, a dedicated bare metal server, or a bare metal cloud machine. Shared servers are the cheapest option available but you share server space and resources with other users, which leads to lower performance and slower speed.
— VPS is shared servers’ older brother, where you share a server with other virtual machines, but your resources are isolated.
— Cloud is another type of virtual server, but it’s part of a fully automated infrastructure, provisioned on a big pool of available physical servers.
— Dedicated servers provide you with your own machine and 100% dedicated resources that offer high performance and extra security.
— Bare metal cloud is a hybrid between dedicated servers and virtualization since they are physical machines with cloud capabilities.
Compared to normal websites, e-commerce hosting requires certain capabilities and server specs, such as SSL encryption, payment processing services, extra security, shopping cart software, scalability, and more. In addition, e-commerce websites need quick and reliable scalability due to seasonal sales, plus days like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, the dreaded pandemic, and so on. There is no need to buy a server and keep it unused for most of the year. Being able to scale up or down according to your needs and using more resources only for the high-traffic periods is an important feature to keep in mind when choosing a server.
This resource appeared originally on the author’s blog and was reprinted with permission.
