VPS hosting is perfect for launching an e-commerce site, while similar in many ways to other web endeavours, sales and security bring their own unique challenges. Your standard informational site has fairly easy content management and hosting requirements are low in comparison to an e-commerce site which is much more resource hungry.
Depending on your level of expertise, you may not know where to start when it comes to getting your site into a functional state. Maybe you’ve heard great things about Magento as an e-commerce platform and want to get right to uploading product listings. If Magento has too much of a learning curve for you, there’s always WordPress with its fleet of plugins to make it a respectable e-commerce platform. The CMS you choose is up to you, but once all of that is established it’s time for the million-dollar question; where am I hosting this thing?
Shared hosting? Not so fast.
Right off the bat, shared hosting has to be disqualified. Yes, no one wants to accrue more overhead and money needs to be saved wherever it can be. But, the money you’re saving by opting for shared hosting isn’t worth the headaches you’re setting yourself up for. Being on the losing end of your server “neighbours” resource usage can take your site offline during critical business hours. Of course, you could also be the person using a tremendous portion of server resources that takes others offline.
E-commerce sites tend to be the sites that push shared hosting to its limits. Either way, you’ll be dealing with more disruptions than you’d care to. Perhaps even more importantly, there are security issues you can avoid by not using shared hosting. If someone else’s site doesn’t have the proper security, all of the sites on the server could be exposed to a malicious attack. As the owner of an e-commerce site, remember what happened to Target’s image in the aftermath of its massive data breach. While you may not expose over 100 million customers’ personal information to the dark web, just one instance of compromising a customer’s personal information could damage your business beyond repair.
What’s the best hosting option, then?
While VPS hosting is a step in the right direction, and perhaps even enough for some smaller storefronts just starting out, dedicated hosting is also an option when it comes to e-commerce sites specifically. If you’ve got exponential growth in your future (as every business owner hopes) you might as well skip straight to the hosting solution you’re going to eventually need anyway.
There is no question opting for a dedicated server is a more expensive hosting option compared to VPS hosting. But this is all relative. If your site is the main driver of your business, the extra resources that come with a dedicated server are critical to your success. If you’ve experienced running an e-commerce site using other hosting solutions, you’ll see that switching to a dedicated server is like getting a supercharge when it comes to loading times, bandwidth, and handling high traffic loads. Using a dedicated server may actually increase how much business you do. Yes, your hosting can actually have an impact on how well visitors respond to your site.
Why would a customer care about where I host my site?
Technically speaking, they won’t. They have no idea who your host is. But they’ll certainly notice the difference throughout their experience visiting your site. Let’s look at some stats. How long do you think the average visitor will tolerate waiting for the site to load? Ten seconds? Five seconds? Not even. You’ve got a whopping two seconds to convince someone coming to your site that you’re open for business. Still, think slow loading times and unresponsiveness are something you can tough out? VPS hosting can help.
Much like in a brick-and-mortar store, wait time plays a big part in customer satisfaction. Have you ever stood in a checkout line that you thought would never end? After evaluating the situation, did you abandon your goods and just leave the store without buying anything? Most people have probably been in that exact situation. Online shoppers are no different. They’ll absolutely move on to the competition if they think they’ll have a smoother experience. And in this case, it doesn’t include having to take a drive across town to the other store. Studies have shown that customers will switch to the competition if they find the competitor’s site is slightly faster than yours. How much faster? About 250 milliseconds, which is about the length of time it takes you to blink your eyes.
VPS Hosting improves sales conversions
Shopping cart abandonment is a real problem that VPS hosting can help cut down on. About 18% of abandoned carts are due to slow loading times, which over the course of the year could end up costing you thousands of dollars in lost sales. The opposite is also true. By reducing your load time by mere seconds, you could see a positive trend in sales numbers.
Also, keep in mind that site speed does have a minor role in your marketing efforts. If you’ve ever engaged in a search engine optimization campaign you know that part of Google’s “secret sauce” that makes up their algorithm is page load times. One of your key goals when marketing your e-commerce site is getting as close to the top of the Google search results as possible. While optimizing your site’s code plays a big part in how well your site loads, your server will also contribute to quicker load times for that Google bonus.
At Gecko, we provide VPS servers at an affordable price, get in touch or sign up today!