Managed Hosting for eCommerce: Important Things to Know
When it comes to managing their websites and servers, eCommerce projects have two options. They can either set up their IT infrastructure themselves and tackle all the technical issues by themselves or they can outsource it to a managed hosting provider.
The second option is great for companies that want to focus exclusively on their growth and marketing and are not willing to spend any extra second on things that are not related to their products.
What exactly is managed eCommerce hosting?
Managed hosting for eCommerce takes care of the IT infrastructure of online stores and other eCommerce projects. The provider is responsible for server setup and management as well as for handling the eCommerce platforms their clients chose – for example, CS-Cart or Magneto.
What is important in hosting for eCommerce?
Customers don’t like waiting – especially when they are going to buy something. According to a Digital.com study, 39% of online shoppers expect eCommerce websites to load within 2-3 seconds. Moreover, 25% of consumers abandon an online store after 4-6 seconds of waiting for it to load, and 19% don’t wait for longer than 3 seconds. Overall, almost half of all online shoppers expect a website to open quickly, otherwise, they will abandon it.
Every extra loading second on your website is a potential risk of shoppers quitting and heading to a faster online store with similar products. That’s why managed eCommerce hosting services focus so much on loading speed and working with minimum latencies. They help their clients optimize their websites and make them faster to ensure there’s no loss of sales because of loading time.
Downtime costs money. Every time a client visits an eCommerce site they are at some stage of their decision to make a purchase. When the store is offline or crashes it interrupts the process of making that decision, which essentially means a loss of money for the store.
From the study by Baymard Institute, it’s clear that 13% of checkout abandonment in online shops happens because of website errors and crashes. Basically, if you make sure that your website doesn’t crash, there’s a chance of increasing your profit by 13%!
Online stores have to be easy to set up. Online merchants are not programmers, still, they need to be able to create friendly straightforward websites where customers can easily purchase their products. eCommerce hosting offers special server configurations to ensure high uptime and meet the demanding market requirements.
Site security is essential. Online stores carry personally identifiable information and process payments. This means that the data on these websites needs to be well protected from any kinds of attacks and leaks. Any hosting should provide strong security to their clients’ data, but for e-commerce services it’s critical.
The Baymard study shows that 18% of people who abandon online stores at the checkout do so because they don’t trust the website with their credit card information – that’s almost every fifth customer!
​​Frequent key data backups are crucial because eCommerce projects update their websites regularly due to constant changes in products and inventory. Hosting services for eCommerce often provide advanced backup and restoration features to save time and effort for their clients.
High expertise in eCommerce platforms. Managed hosting services specialized in eCommerce can set up and optimize clients’ servers for, say, CS-cart or Magento systems right away without wasting time experimenting with different configurations.
Scalesta is a high-end managed hosting provider for eCommerce projects. We guarantee top performance, security, and expert support to a business of any size. Our team consists of developers, SysOps, and DevOps engineers who work with eCommerce platforms on a daily basis and make projects better, faster, and more effective.