The year 2020 with the Covid-19 pandemic, brought many changes for business. Companies around the world have faced many constraints on a scale we’ve never seen before. Many retail stores were forced to temporarily suspend their operations or introduce limits to the number of customers served. This situation accelerated the development of online sales, which is still growing every year. This is due not only to changes in the lifestyle and preferences of customers, but also to the development of technology and the introduction of new business models, such as dropshipping or e-commerce franchise, which have significantly lowered the barriers to entering the market.
A fast cloud server can increase the number of conversions
Such development of online sales means not only easier entry to the e-commerce market for entrepreneurs, but also bigger competition and higher customer expectations. At a time when purchasing decisions are made very quickly, often on the spur of the moment, using a mobile phone, page loading time and the smoothness of the entire purchasing process are extremely important. Too slow operation of the website results in an increase in the number of abandoned carts, and thus, often wasted funds allocated for advertising in social media or search engines. Customers do not want to wait a few seconds for the website to open, and the easy availability of products on the market makes them willing to give up the purchase at any time and take advantage of the offer of another seller. For this reason, it is worth considering choosing a fast cloud server.
Does an online store need guaranteed resources provided by a cloud server?
Whether an online store can be located on a shared server or should have guaranteed resources such as CPU or RAM depends on several factors. First of all, the size of the store is important – the number of products which it sells. For big number of products, requests such as searching or filtering products by customers require more resources to be fast and not discourage users. Therefore, for a large store, it is worth choosing a fast cloud server. The same is true for stores with high customer traffic, where there are a lot of requests generated at the same time.
The cloud server enables flexible scaling
In contrast to a shared server and a dedicated server, the server in the cloud gives the possibility of resource scaling. This functionality is great for e-commerce websites. Online stores are often exposed to considerable fluctuations in traffic. More customers visiting the store can be expected, for example, in the pre-holiday season, during promotions or sales, or during periods of more intense advertising activities. The server in the cloud enables flexible scaling of resources – by expecting more visits, we can increase the number of allocated CPUs and the amount of RAM, and during periods of downtime, reduce them to limit costs. Thanks to the hourly billing, we pay exactly for the resources we used.
Dedicated resources for reports and analyzes
The online store is not only the front that customers see. E-commerce business requires conducting many reports and analyzes, researching user behavior on the website, real-time analyzes, storing historical data for use in reports. Often, prices are changed dynamically on the basis of various indicators. All these operations require dedicated computing power that cannot be guaranteed by shared hosting, but a cloud server does.
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