Why Your eCommerce Website Needs a Dedicated Server

As online sales continue to grow, the demand for powerful eCommerce hosting is increasing. Even traditional brick-and-mortar retailers are recognizing the potential of selling online. The right hosting provider can help small business owners and established retail chains transition all or part of their business to a successful online solution.

What Is eCommerce Hosting?

A well-managed eCommerce site can handle multiple visitors from anywhere in the world, supporting sales every day. To increase revenue, your eCommerce site needs to stand out and offer a unique solution amidst growing competitors. Your web hosting solution should also provide reliable performance and security to build customer trust and increase sales.

When it comes to eCommerce solutions, uptime is crucial. Any downtime can drive potential sales away, so it's essential to have a host with a 99.9% uptime guarantee. A reputable hosting company should also provide technical support to help quickly resolve any issues that may occur. It's essential to have access to all software and features, including online shopping carts, customer reward programs, and third-party payment processors.

This is why your eCommerce website needs a dedicated server to ensure a smooth a better shopping experience for your customers.

Why You Should Use Dedicated Servers

As a business owner, you're no stranger to the fact that busy seasons lead to increased sales - and the same goes for your website. Whether you're running an eCommerce store or a marketing website for a brand, you'll likely experience surges in traffic that far exceed your typical monthly traffic. 

But simply waiting around for customers to flock to your site isn't enough. Instead, you need to be proactive and take steps to prepare for these spikes in traffic. Otherwise, your server infrastructure may be strained, and your website could go down - resulting in lost sales and unhappy customers. 

To prevent this from happening, consider switching to a dedicated server hosting setup. This can help ensure that your website stays up and running during even the busiest times, enabling you to capture every last dollar that you deserve for your eCommerce website.

What Are the Benefits of Dedicated Servers? 

Unlike other hosting solutions, a dedicated server is specific to you and no other businesses. It works exclusively for you, using all of its resources to support the traffic on your website (or web app). In addition, dedicated servers can be customized and configured to specifically serve your business needs based on your tech stack, assets, and audience size.

Here are eight reasons why your eCommerce website needs a dedicated server:

1. Handle Increased Traffic

High traffic is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, more traffic means more sales. On the other, too much traffic can overload your server and take your website offline — with frustrated customers and no sales. 

A dedicated server allows you to build enough capacity to handle traffic spikes of any size. Unlike shared servers, you can be sure that your dedicated server’s installed CPU and RAM are reserved exclusively for your use. 

2. Enable Faster Transactions

Even when your website doesn’t go offline due to the increased traffic, it might become slow to accommodate all the requests to the server. In addition, slow websites discourage visitors from spending much time on them, and more visitors would likely leave your website without purchasing anything. 

With a dedicated server, you can expect peak performance at all times. Your server efficiently handles your transactions when properly configured.

3. Improve Security

Security is essential for eCommerce websites since they handle a lot of sensitive information, from personal details to credit card numbers. Shared servers apply the same basic security setup for every tenant, which they rarely detail. Dedicated servers allow you to control every aspect of your hosting environment, from firewalls to backups to software installations. 

4. Provide a Better User Experience

Visitors tend to return to websites with better user experience, which means a higher probability for you to make a sale. Besides quickly loading pages and processing requests, websites powered by dedicated servers can guarantee virtually 100% uptime and become dependable resources for their audience. 

5. Become More Cost-Effective

Some websites choose to handle traffic spikes with cloud-based pay-per-use solutions. Cloud-based infrastructure can be scaled very quickly, as needed. However, that additional power often comes at a steep cost that might be completely unexpected. 

A dedicated server ensures predictability, with all the costs known in advance, making planning and budgeting effortless. 

6. Boost Your SEO

A fast website is pleasing for your visitors, and Google and other search engines tend to include loading times in their algorithms and rank fast websites higher. Higher search rankings do wonders for your business, especially during busy shopping seasons.

7. Achieve Maximum Privacy

Every business handling sensitive data must ensure that data stays safe and private. Since dedicated servers don’t share components or resources with anyone, they create perfect environments for ensuring privacy. 

Governments, agencies, and healthcare providers, where maintaining privacy is critical, tend to rely on dedicated servers for their needs. So even with regulatory acts like HIPAA, dedicated servers are the way to go. 

8. Have Enough Storage

Running an eCommerce website means dealing with and storing many files, such as promo videos, product images, and how-tos. It is critical to have enough space to store all those files, transfer them, and call them up when needed. Even more so is the ability to back everything up and trust those backups. 

A dedicated server makes it easy to see how much space you’re using and how much free space is left. You can even split the website, archive, and backup data between hard drives to ensure that the server uses only the data needed for website operations. 

Find Out More About Dedicated Servers for eCommerce Websites

Using a dedicated server for your eCommerce website strategy is paramount in ensuring smooth transactions and secure customer data. It’s critical for bigger businesses where traffic is increasing, but it can also be advantageous for small businesses.

You can rest assured that, no matter how familiar you are with the eCommerce world, your customers will be taken care of. With features such as increased traffic handling abilities, faster transactions, improved security, and higher-level user experiences, hosting an eCommerce platform on a dedicated server is something every business should consider. 

You can also expect it to cost less over time while taking regular SEO measures further and finally achieving maximum privacy when it comes to customer data stored on the server. If you’re looking to take your eCommerce platform up a notch and make sure your customers are taken care of like never before, turn to dedicated servers; they could be the answer you were searching for.

Contact the sales staff at Liquid Web. They can answer any questions about dedicated servers and suggest the best options based on your current setup and needs.