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VPS → Cloud VPS For Ecommerce Site
Cloud VPS hosting for an ecommerce website
Ecommerce is an industry with near-limitless growth potential due to its convenience, reach, and 24/7 ability to serve customer needs.
Insider Intelligence forecasted that 20.8 percent of retail purchases would happen online in 2023. That’s expected to grow to 24 percent by 2026. Business owners and ecommerce entrepreneurs who invest in their digital infrastructure today will be best positioned to take advantage of this growth period.
Web hosting is one of the best places to begin when improving digital infrastructure, as it is the foundation on which everything else is built.
When searching for an ecommerce web hosting solution, there are several key features and capabilities to look for. Uptime guarantees, security features, performance, and dynamic scalability are just a few.
One game-changing option for ecommerce websites is cloud virtual private server (VPS) hosting. It’s revolutionized the way online businesses manage their digital infrastructure.
In this article, we’ll explore cloud VPS hosting for ecommerce websites, including what to look for in a solution and how to get the most out of the platform you choose.
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Understanding cloud VPS hosting for ecommerce
Understanding how virtual private server (VPS) hosting works is key to grasping the ins and outs of cloud VPS hosting.
A traditional VPS provides an isolated hosting environment that leverages virtualization technology to efficiently allocate resources. These resources can come from a single host (such as a dedicated server) or a cluster of hosts. A virtual machine manager or hypervisor that runs virtual machines on a host/parent server manages this environment. Each virtual machine within the host or parent server is commonly called a guest or child instance.
Cloud VPS hosting takes this concept a step further by combining the benefits of cloud computing with a traditional VPS environment, providing end users with dynamic provisioning in a fully scalable virtual environment.
Cloud VPS hosting offers a more efficient, agile, and secure alternative to shared hosting solutions. This is especially advantageous for ecommerce businesses in need of a dedicated resource environment that enables them to dynamically scale and meet the demands of online retail. Cloud VPS hosting empowers them to do this reliably, flexibly, and without compromising on performance.
4 key features tailored for ecommerce in cloud VPS hosting
Cloud VPS hosting for ecommerce offers several key benefits specifically tailored for online sellers. Some of the main benefits of VPS hosting include scalability, high system availability, low redundancy, enhanced security, and cost-efficient pay-as-you-go pricing models.
1. Scalability tailored for ecommerce
Cloud VPS hosting allows ecommerce sites to dynamically scale their resources up and down during sales spikes and seasonal variations. This provides consistent performance without having to pay for infrastructure and resources you might only need a few times each year when your business is experiencing peak demand.
And if your needs call for a change, it’s easy to scale up or down your plan. Top-tier hosting plans provide tiered offerings in a range of memory and CPU combinations.
2. Redundancy and high availability
Cloud VPS hosting for ecommerce solutions’ redundant infrastructure heavily increases system reliability. Providing redundancy through multiple servers safeguards you and your clients so business can carry on as usual through lapses in functionality.
Look for cloud VPS solutions that provide redundant infrastructure and, if possible, guarantee 100 percent power and network availability.
This can save you thousands of dollars should your system go down during a critical business period. Not only does this downtime result in direct loss of sales, but also severely impacts the productivity of your teams.
3. Enhanced security for online transactions
Cloud VPS hosting for ecommerce helps protect sensitive customer information like names, addresses, and payment details during digital transactions. How? Through robust security features like encryption and web application firewalls (WAFs), among other best-in-class cloud cybersecurity measures.
Further, VPS environments benefit from using virtualization to move away from costly physical dedicated servers or shared hosting setups with significant cybersecurity shortcomings.
In a cloud VPS hosting environment, you are the only organization with root access control over your server. This is a stark contrast to shared hosting, where one user or organization with a weak password or insufficient security measures places the entire server and everyone using it at risk.
Ecommerce operators looking to build a sustainable business can’t risk being compromised by malicious actors looking to take advantage of system vulnerabilities and steal confidential client data.
4. Cost-efficient pay-as-you-go pricing
One of the major benefits of cloud VPS hosting for ecommerce sites in a period of growth or simply experiencing volatile revenue is cost-efficient, pay-as-you-go pricing models. This type of pricing model benefits businesses of all sizes by perfectly aligning costs with the amount of resources they use in any given time period.
Pay-as-you-go pricing allows you to scale your digital infrastructure up and down through high and low periods while maintaining sufficient resources to support any sudden spike without bottlenecking your system or increasing downtime.
Optimizing cloud VPS performance for ecommerce success
Generally, cloud VPS hosting for ecommerce businesses allows for a high level of optimization post-migration. This enables you to perfectly calibrate your new environment to your needs.
There are countless ways to tweak and adjust a cloud VPS environment, but two of the most impactful are through the allocation of the infrastructure’s technical resources and the implementation of content delivery networks (CDNs), geographically distributed groups of servers that help accelerate loading times.
- Allocating technical resources strategically and efficiently is one of the best performance optimization strategies. This can be done in various ways, such as resource monitoring, analysis, automation, virtualization, and containerization.
- Implementing CDNs empowers much faster transactions by caching content at the network edge. This significantly accelerates page load times and makes the end-user experience seamless for customers.
Tailoring cloud VPS for ecommerce platforms
One of the most important considerations when making an infrastructure decision is its integration capabilities. Remember, it’s all about finding a solution you can tailor to your needs.
Cloud VPS hosting for ecommerce sites offers operators seamless integration with popular ecommerce platforms such as Magento, WooCommerce, Shopify, and countless others. This significantly reduces friction when migrating or making system adjustments to further optimize.
Another key consideration when deciding on a cloud VPS solution are the specific database requirements for your ecommerce operation. Details such as transaction volume and the amount of customer data you need readily available are crucial to selecting a solution that works best for your specific business. Having this knowledge readily available before migration helps you choose the infrastructure you need for optimal performance during your ecommerce transactions.
Smooth migration to cloud VPS hosting for ecommerce growth
A central aspect of successfully implementing cloud VPS hosting for ecommerce businesses is the initial migration from whatever hosting environment you currently use to cloud VPS. While the specific details of migration vary in each instance, there are two aspects to always consider: minimizing downtime and ensuring data integrity throughout the migration.
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Minimizing downtime
The best way to minimize downtime when migrating to cloud VPS hosting for ecommerce sites is to meticulously plan the migration before beginning and understand the options available to you. Hardware and software failures, network problems, and security incidents cause the vast majority of reported system downtime for online businesses.
To counteract this, ecommerce operators should invest early in their digital infrastructure and implement redundancy and failover systems that can stand by and step in if your main system goes down without interrupting regular business flow. For example, using migration methods that enable redirecting traffic to the new cloud VPS environment with minimal downtime can help ease the transition.
Committing to regular system updates and maintenance, as well as continual monitoring and automation, can also significantly reduce your site’s overall downtime.
Ensuring data integrity
Data integrity refers to the accuracy, completeness, and quality of your data as it is maintained over time and transferred across various formats.
Compromising your company’s key data can prove catastrophic for ecommerce businesses that rely heavily upon it for key decisions. It can also be a compliance nightmare. There are several highly effective strategies your organization can implement to ensure data integrity, such as input validation, backups, audit trails, and appropriate access controls.
It is important to understand that protecting your key data’s integrity is an ongoing process. It’s not something you can just do once and forget but rather it should be part of your regular, day-to-day systems moving forward.
White glove migration
While it is possible for ecommerce operators to conduct their cloud migrations themselves, the process can prove troublesome for those without a significant technical background and, as such, is not generally advised. Luckily, many hosting companies offer complimentary white glove migration services within managed hosting packages.
This alleviates the stress of migration and allows you to continue focusing solely on the tasks that impact your business most. There’s no worrying about accidentally making a costly migration mistake.
Next steps for cloud VPS hosting
Cloud VPS hosting for ecommerce sites is one of the most effective and simple ways to elevate an online business to new heights during this period of massive digital adoption. Implementing a cloud solution helps you get the most out of your digital infrastructure budget and provides the perfect foundation to continue scaling your ecommerce operation in the coming years.
When you’re ready to upgrade your hosting to a high-quality VPS, Liquid Web can help. We’ve been leading the industry for decades, because our VPS servers are fast, cloud-based for easy scalability, and unbeatably reliable. Choose your favorite OS and the management tier that works best for you.
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Additional resources
VPS: A Beginner’s Guide →
A complete beginner’s guide to virtual private servers
Plesk VPS benefits →
9 key benefits that a Plesk control panel can bring to your VPS server
What is managed VPS hosting? →
Benefits, use cases, and how to decide if it’s right for you
Amanda Valle is Global Director of Organic Search at Liquid Web and a seasoned SEO, user acquisition, digital marketing leader. She has 20+ years of experience in digital marketing, SEO, and content marketing, and holds certifications from SEMrush and Google Analytics. When she’s not driving revenue, she enjoys spending time with her girls.