How To Deal With Traffic Spikes of Ecommerce Store

There was once a time when you could’ve sold just about any product over the web and made a whole lot of money. The competition was minimal and the traffic was not high enough to take down the server. 

The modern-day entrepreneurs face many ecommerce challenges that can sink the business if not handled appropriately. To boost online sales, online stores offer various promotions, deals, and discounts to attract potential prospects, especially during the holiday season. 

Consequently, the volume of online traffic multiplies significantly during the biggest online shopping extravaganza of the year. Unfortunately, many online stores are incompetent to handle the holiday season traffic spike effectively.  

Ecommerce Challenges During The Holiday Season

The online traffic spike becomes intense during the last few weeks of the holiday season, resulting in sudden website crashes, forcing your online customer to buy from the competitors. There are many ecommerce challenges that entrepreneurs tend to face during the holiday season. In my opinion, the top three issues that online store owners face, include are:  

#1 Online Store Performance

In the real world, if your webpage doesn’t load in under three seconds, many  of your customers will leave your online store. Therefore, you must focus on improving the load time of your web pages at all costs. 

You can start with making your webpage as light as possible so that it loads in under three  seconds. Also, if your web server is far away from the location of your online prospect, or if it doesn’t have a cache in place, your ecommerce website will take more than three seconds to load.

#2 Online Server Scalability

Another big issue for online entrepreneurs relates to server scalability. To better serve your customers during the holiday season where online traffic increases significantly, you must have the necessary resources to scale your ecommerce website by using best WooCommerce hosting.

Many online stores shut down as soon as they run out of server resources because the underlined hosting solutions are not scalable (This is a common incident on shared hosting solutions). This has a direct impact on the store revenues and profitability. Therefore, it’s a wise decision to opt for a reliable cloud hosting service for ecommerce instead of hosting your online store on unreliable hosting solutions that could hurt your business operations. 

#3 Online Store Security

Security of ecommerce stores is perhaps the most important challenge for online entrepreneurs. Online stores gather sensitive data that includes customer contact information, credit card and banking credentials, etc. The security of this data demands constant vigilance on the part of online store owners (a chore that can take up a significant chunk of their valuable time). Managed eCommerce-hosting platforms such as Cloudways take security very seriously and deploy various industry proven security measures at all levels. At the minimum, a store should have a valid SSL certificate to encrypt data exchange and Two Factor Authentication (TFA) to harden the excess to user accounts.

The Ideal Solution – A Managed Cloud Hosting Service

Cloud hosting has become progressively popular in the last decade, and it is for good  reason. Keeping its recent rise in focus, you might have a few concerns regarding cloud hosting. Needless to worry though, as cloud hosting is a flexible, scalable, and high-performing solution that brings a unique set of features for ecommerce businesses. Here are my top five  reasons why you should opt for cloud hosting for your ecommerce business.

• Cloud hosting is comparably faster than the shared hosting or a Virtual Private Server (VPS). Primarily because it isn’t homebound to a single server like other web hosts. 
• Cloud hosting lets you conveniently scale your server with memory, bandwidth and storage.
• Comparatively, shared hosting offers two or three domains whereas a many cloud servers offer unlimited domains that you can point to a single server.
• Cloud hosting offers great data backup and recovery solutions unlike other web hosting solutions.
• You can manage a cloud server with a minimum effort. Also, you only have to pay for the resources you consume.

Cloud hosting may become complicated if you lack the technical skills that are required to manage a cloud server. Nonetheless, a managed cloud hosting service like Cloudways can help you manage servers launched on leading cloud infrastructure providers like Linode, Vultr, DigitalOcean, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Compute Engine (GCE). Cloudways can greatly assist you in dealing with traffic spikes during the holiday season by providing scalable server management options. The best ecommerce solutons are WooCommerce and Shopify you can read about WooCommerce vs Shopify comparison and choose your best option.

Why Cloudways?

There are many reasons why ecommerce entrepreneurs choose Cloudways as their managed hosting partner. Some of the top reasons include: 

#1 Offers Dedicated Server

Given the dynamic nature of the ecommerce industry, Cloudways understands that nothing less than a dedicated server can guarantee the top performance (page load time) of your website. 

During the high-traffic season, the  dedicated server resources ensure that your visitors experience maximum server and application performance regardless of the load on the server resources. 

#2 1-Click Server Scalability

It is difficult to promise 99% uptime for ecommerce websites, however, Cloudways strives to ensure that their clients enjoy maximum uptime at all times. They help you scale your online business, especially during the crazy online shopping season by ensuring you never run out of server resources. Cloudways offers one-click scaling of server resources including RAM, bandwidth, and storage.

#3 Cloudways Hosting Stack

Cloudways offers a solid cloud hosting stack that is a powerful combination of Apache and NGINX web servers, Memcached, Varnish, and Redis caches. Its design can optimize your website’s performance so that you can scale your online business without worrying about infrastructure performance. 

#4 Backup & Restoration of Data 

What if you accidentally delete something from your website? Or even worse, what if your website gets hacked? Most web hosting companies don’t offer automatic backups. Even when they do, they don’t allow users to set their frequencies. On the other hand, Cloudways platform allows you to set your frequencies for automatic website backups to ensure maximum security of your data at all times.

#5 Pay-As-You-Go Pricing Model

How much will you pay for a reliable cloud hosting service for your ecommerce business? Most entrepreneurs wish to pay a minimum amount for their hosting needs. Meanwhile it may be a pocket-friendly decision, it has long term consequences for the project. To meet the user half-way, Cloudways offers a pay-as-you-go billing model where you only pay for the server resources you consume during a billing cycle. The cherry on top – you can host as many websites as you want on your cloud server. This is a jackpot for people who run multiple dropshipping or ecommerce stores. To make things simple, Cloudways sends you a single invoice that includes all the costs of hosting your projects on your managed servers, thereby removing the frustration of dealing with multiple invoices. 

#6 24/7 Expert Support

We all know that the best web hosting for ecommerce service must offer 24/7/365 dedicated customer support with email, telephone, as well as Live Chat features. Cloudways doesn’t only offer all this, but also delivers notifications about server and application health through the CloudwaysBot.

#7 CloudwaysCDN 

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) reduces the time required to access your website. It minimizes the load on the original server hosting the website data and greatly enhances the user experience. Additionally, CDN can also protect your website from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. With Cloudways, adding a CDN to your ecommerce website is fairly easy. Simply go to the Application Management tab on the Cloudways dashboard and click CloudwaysCDN. Add the relevant information and click Apply. 

By and large, 

Gone are the days when ecommerce businesses used to host their online store on a VPS or a shared server. In today’s digital landscape, nothing beats cloud hosting. You have to ensure that your product pages load in under three seconds at all times or else, you will lose potential business during the largest online shopping season of the year. 

A reliable ecommerce hosting provider like Cloudways allows you to scale your cloud server with ease so that you can effectively deal with the holiday season traffic spikes and continue to make sales regardless of the number of visitors on your online store.