Quality Hosting is critical to eCommerce success. Period.
Trilok Dhamecha, Partner
When it comes to searching for good quality hosting, most of the so-called reviews and recommendations are just affiliate commission recommendations and massive SEO to get the ranking up in Google.
So we asked Google for the best eCommerce web hosting companies and guess what all of the recommendations were just “JUNK”. We say JUNK – because they are junk.
These are fine for small-scale eCommerce shops but potentially crippling for any shop with over 10 to 15 transactions per day. Even though some of the recommendations on the list say’s “Large stores”, mind you 15 transactions per day is just nothing.
The question that is running through your mind right now – how can we claim we are better than others. Surely, we can! We did our test by 3rd party testing services and guess what we are the best.
If you see the results and compare it with some of the recommendations that we found on Google search – let the results speak for itself. Let me disclose we are not against of Affiliate Commission. We also have an affiliate program that we run. Our affiliate program is more lucrative as we pay for a lifetime of the customer. Why? Because we want our affiliate to give honest reviews and not post ranking just for the sake of 1-time commissions.
What we are against is the hypocrisy when affiliate marketers will recommend any provider without actually testing it or using it etc. True recommendations are lost in all the noise.
Is eCommerce Hosting “Mission Critical” for Business?
A mission critical factor of a system is any factor (component, equipment, personnel, process, procedure, software, etc.) that is essential to business operation or to an organisation.
In simple terms, if the mission-critical system fails, everything fails. When it comes to eCommerce, hosting is your mission-critical factor. If your hosting provider fails, everything will fail, drop in revenues, loss of customers, loss of data, etc.
Why do Budget or third-grade hosting providers fail?
- Low investment in hardware (CPU, RAM, SSD, etc), causing the server to overload
- Overselling of hosting space (most of the budget hosting will always oversell)
- Low or no investment in technology adaptation (HTTP/2, PHP 7.4, etc.)
- Servers are not optimized (no server-level caching, Port Speed, SSD, etc)
- Poor Technical Support, with lower budgets, the quality of Customer Service will also bad and resolution times can even take weeks.
How does Managed Hosting Help an eCommerce Business?
Helps to Reduce IT Risks
When it comes to eCommerce their survival depends on the uptime of their website. If the website goes offline – the company can go under. For instance, an eCommerce client of ours was with poor quality budget hosting providers (took them 8 days to get their VPS back online). They spent a lot of money on TV Ads, building up their sales funnels for a massive Christmas Sale and over Christmas there was a major outage on their servers and site was offline. There was no way to get it back up.
What we had to do is spin-off a new server with a new temporary domain. Got their important products online and created a 302 HTTP redirect from the primary domain to their new domain. The net result was that they could only do less than 35% of expected sales apart from major loss for all the money spent on TV Commercials, PPC Campaigns, Social Media Outreach, Coupon Distribution, etc. It took them over 9 months’ worth of new business to recover from the losses.
Once their primary server was up, we copied and migrated their VPS to our GCH Cloud Compute Servers. It’s been over 4yrs and they still have not had a single downtime.
Helps you to work with best technical experts
Working with technical experts who can provide you with correct frank advice always makes that difference. Our technical team will advise what is good for the client and not what is we can sell more. We believe in the client’s success.
For an eCommerce website, they have better things to worry about from PPC Campaigns, New Products, Website design, Operations, etc. Hosting even through it is mission-critical it is never on the list of priorities.
You need a solid team that can ensure that your back is covered as you focus on your business.
Another harsh truth about the hosting companies is that most of the companies have customer support who are not experts. This results into slow response times and a whole heap of wasted time as you struggle to get them to fix something. With GCH’s customer support 90% of tickets are resolved at L1 level and L2 can resolve issues within 4 hours.
Data & Time as Metrics
When it comes to eCommerce Hosting, all companies much know their restore points i.e. amount of data loss and time to restore i.e. the amount of downtime that can be afforded. Based on these two key metrics it will define your disaster recovery plan.
Most of the companies whom we surveyed never had a clue as to the amount of data loss or the time to recover. Smaller the value for both there is an increase in cost. This means that value needs to be small but realistic for the IT budget. Premium Hosting companies like us, are in a much better place to reduce those times than other web hosting providers.
If we put in an example for you, say your eCommerce site receives about 1 transaction every 3 hours. So having a backup every 12 hours or so is fine, which means there is only a loss of 2 to 3 transactions, which can be recovered manually. But, what if you are getting sales every 10min? That is a very different backup strategy and restore points will be different. The whole purpose is to minimize the loss of data and downtime.
Bespoke Solutions
When it comes to eCommerce business there is no standard solution. Each company will have different business models in a different way of working and performance. If a company is dealing with physical goods is very different from a company dealing with digital goods.
A lot of hosting companies only have standard solutions (Shared, VPS & Dedicated). Solutions will need to have high availability (via clusters & cloud) high-performance computing, internal network or bandwidth management, etc.
When you come to premium providers like us, we can offer a whole range of solutions that will suit your needs some of them are:
- Business Hosting (For small stores about 50 transactions per day)
- VPS (for medium stores 100+ transactions per day)
- Dedicated Servers (200+ transactions per day)
- GCH Cloud Platform (50 transactions to “unlimited” transactions per day)
When it comes to premium hosting, most of us have a leg up mainly because we have automation in place to ensure that servers are fine-tuned for customer requirements including security and ensuring that for your task there is always someone available for you.
Fewer Restrictions
There is an industry-wide debate as to work with a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider or to invest in own infrastructure. Generally, when it comes to SaaS you are restricted within their constraints. We have seen a lot of startups modify their business model so that it can fit within the business model of the SaaS provider. This is the worst kind of mistake anyone can make.
Never sacrifice your business model just because your provider can’t support it. It is better to have an investment in own technology you will have complete freedom to have your system run exactly the way your business model wants it to. This increases your success rate and hopefully one day you can be a unicorn.
What if Airbnb restricted themselves to the system that was available, do you think it would have been what it is today? Success comes to them who are able to break free from such restrictions.
Another advantage you are never locked down with a single vendor. Your data belong to you. You can easily migrate to release newer versions that can adapt to the markets and not wait for your SaaS to release a version that fits your audience.
Higher scalability & Elasticity
eCommerce as Business can be seasonal. There are shopping festival like “Black Friday”, “11.11” or seasons like Christmas, Valentines Day, Easter, etc. Where there is a higher requirement of resources and you need to find a vendor who can ensure that resources are provided to you in “On-Demand” what if you have to wait to get in newer compute nodes and your black Friday is over?
This is where GCH Cloud comes into play. We can deliver to you the high availability clusters that are centered around your requirements. Adding a new Compute or Storage will be on-demand. So you don’t have to wait for days until a new server comes in and installed.
We have invested a lot in automation. We can provide both Infrastructure-as-a-Service & also Platform-as-a-Service. This kind of capability is not there with most of the hosting providers.
Final Thoughts
If you are a small store or a hobby eCommerce it’s better to use Managed WooCommerce services. Where you can set up your WooCommerce store and we can manage it for you.
If you are a bigger store that is looking to go beyond 1000+ transactions per day, our Cloud Solutions is what you should be looking at. Employment of Cloud solution for your eCommerce business brings tremendous positive changes to the enterprise while leveraging the cost of in house IT department.
The eCommerce industry has already started migrating to the cloud technology to reap the benefits of speed, performance, scalability, security and more to serve better customer experience, grow their business and gain loyalty.
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