Liquid Web You’ve made it. Your ecommerce store is hitting your profitability goals. But, just as you reflect on what it took to get to this point, the unthinkable happens—your store crashes. And you were about to have your biggest day in sales, too. The horror!
No ecommerce website deserves this fate. The good news? It’s completely avoidable.
Investing in reliable hosting for your ecommerce platform can make nightmarish scenarios like the one above a thing of the past. But with so many options available — like shared, dedicated, and virtual private server (VPS) hosting — it can be challenging to choose the right one.
VPS hosting for ecommerce provides a nice, reliable middle ground between shared and dedicated options. With VPS, you can pair the cost-effectiveness of shared hosting with the privacy and power of a dedicated server.
Let’s dive into why it may be exactly what you and your ecommerce business need.
Key features and benefits of VPS hosting for ecommerce
When considering hosting options for your new ecommerce business, a key question arises: “Should I choose VPS hosting for my site?” Let’s simplify that decision by highlighting the main advantages of VPS hosting:
- Control: VPS hosting gives you full root access to the operating system, allowing complete administrative control over server settings, unlike shared hosting, which limits configurations through a third-party vendor.
- Isolated virtual environment: VPS hosting provides a separate, isolated environment for your site, enhancing security and performance compared to shared hosting.
- Scalability: With VPS, you can easily scale resources like RAM, storage, and processing power through one-click upgrades, ideal for handling traffic spikes during promotions or holidays.
- Customization: VPS users can fully customize their server, from operating systems to software applications, thanks to the absence of root access barriers.
- Enhanced security: VPS allows for advanced security measures, such as firewalls and SSL certificates, while also reducing vulnerabilities by isolating your site from others on the same server.
- Snapshots and backup: Most VPS plans offer snapshots or backups, making it easy to restore your server to a previous stable state if needed.
- Guaranteed resources: VPS plans guarantee resource levels for system components like RAM, computing capacity, and hard drive disk (HDD) storage space. This provides more consistent performance when comparing VPS vs. shared hosting. Because VPS providers guarantee these resource allocations, users can expect high performance levels during peak traffic and workload hours.
- High uptime: With dedicated resources and redundancy options, VPS typically provides higher uptime, crucial for ecommerce sites to remain available during peak traffic times. The last thing you want is for your site — and inventory — to be unavailable during peak promotion and seasonal traffic.
These features make VPS hosting a powerful choice for growing ecommerce businesses seeking control, security, and reliability.
VPS performance optimization
Website owners who choose VPS hosting for ecommerce generally do so to get the best of both worlds. Pairing the flexibility and cost-effectiveness of shared hosting with the security and performance of dedicated server resources can give ecommerce stores using VPS a leg up.
Here are a few pointers you can take to your own hosting platform to elevate the performance of your VPS.
Choose the right VPS configuration
Match the VPS RAM, CPU cores, storage type, and bandwidth to your application and traffic requirements. Thanks to the flexibility of VPS, ecommerce entrepreneurs can upgrade as necessary to ensure adequate resource allocation and the proper setup for their store’s changing needs.
Tune resource usage
Monitor resource usage and optimize through steps like enabling Apache/Nginx caching, PHP caching via Memcache, and database query caching. Install caching plugins for content management systems (CMS) like WordPress.
Enable content delivery network (CDN)
Use a CDN to cache static content globally. This means content that website visitors routinely access will essentially be stored in a “pre-loaded” state. The result is faster content speed and less strain on VPS resources, optimizing performance and maximizing your store’s uptime.
Set up caching and load balancing
Implement tools like Varnish cache to reduce trips to the back-end database. Use load balancing across multiple VPS instances to get the most out of your virtual private server. Load balancers will examine the server resources across your VPS instances and distribute traffic or processing workload to the environments with the most available resources. This optimizes performance and prevents service disruption.
Use a server stack optimized for performance
Choose a Linux distro and software stack tuned for speed, like Nginx web server, LiteSpeed or Apache. Linux is typically faster and more lightweight than Windows options. Tweak the configuration for high concurrency and low latency to maximize responsiveness and throughput — the amount of data a server or network can process and transmit in a particular time frame.
Profile and audit code
Run your website’s code through periodic code audits to eliminate inefficient scripts. Profile these scripts to isolate bottlenecks. Profiling and isolating bottlenecks may differ depending on your site’s programming language. This strategy can be effective but is a little more advanced. In light of this, working with a professional web developer might be worth the extra investment.
Limit cron jobs
Cron jobs are time-based or scheduled events triggered by scripts in your website’s code. You can optimize these tasks and reduce their risk to the overall server workload by scheduling them for non-peak hours when traffic is most likely at its lowest. Examples of cron jobs in ecommerce might include backup automation or clearing out product caches.
Isolate database server
Using a separate VPS instance to store your site’s database helps reduce the workload on the application server and allows for independent scaling. You may need to tune the database server’s configuration for optimal storage and performance.
Considerations for ecommerce platforms
When considering VPS hosting for your ecommerce store, it’s essential to conduct thorough research. Here are key factors to consider when selecting a VPS platform:
- Operating system: Most ecommerce platforms have required, recommended, or preferred operating systems. You must ensure your hosting platform supports the same OS your ecommerce infrastructure uses. For example, if your ecommerce platform runs on Windows, make sure you work with a hosting provider that runs a Windows VPS.
- Web server: Similarly, platforms may require specific web servers like Apache, Nginx, or Internet Information Services (IIS). Ensure the VPS you choose is compatible with the corresponding web server.
- Resources: Carefully evaluate the system resources the ecommerce platform needs, such as minimum RAM, HDD storage, bandwidth, or CPU processing speed. Build your VPS accordingly for optimal performance. As your ecommerce site grows, you may need to explore using multiple VPS instances and a load balancer to properly distribute your traffic or data.
- Database server: Different ecommerce platforms support various back-end database formats — typically MySQL, MariaDB, or NoSQL. Ensure your VPS platform accommodates the appropriate database format.
- SSL certificate: Enable HTTPS via SSL certificates to securely serve ecommerce sites and comply with payment processor requirements involving data protection. How you implement SSL certificates will differ depending on your hosting provider. Whichever provider you choose should have articles readily available in their help or learning centers to guide you.
- Application dependencies: Website code frameworks or libraries like hypertext preprocessor (PHP), Python, or Node.js may be a requirement for your ecommerce platform. Verify they’re available and can be set up within your VPS tech stack.
- Extensibility and integration: Many ecommerce platforms need to connect to external services like shipping, tax, and payment. The VPS should provide the flexibility to install extensions or plugins or allow seamless third-party integrations.
Migration to VPS hosting
If you decide to use VPS hosting for your ecommerce site, planning your migration in advance is crucial to minimize downtime and service disruption.
Pre-migration
Take inventory of product data, customer information, order history records, and where you currently store all this information.
Next, you’ll want to ensure your VPS provider can meet site capacity, speed, and storage needs. With the new provider’s resources in mind, design an optimal architecture for how your data will live on the new server.
Once the overall data storage plan is in place, you can map out necessary data migration flows from the old to the new location.
Migration
Data transfer at this scale will most likely interrupt site performance and your website visitors’ shopping experience. It’s best to pull your site offline while the migration is underway. As such, schedule VPS migration during low-traffic hours and on a date that allows you to give your customers ample notice.
The data itself must be carefully migrated to the new VPS. Transfer product images, documents, and other files to the new storage systems, but verify backups are intact. Customer details should be in CSV export format, removing unnecessary personal information. Import customer CSVs to the new database in small batches, testing regularly for proper integration.
Database migration tools can help to seamlessly synchronize old and new databases, removing unnecessary or duplicate entries.
Post-migration
Closely observe site performance on the VPS the first few weeks after migration to catch any potential issues. Run more validation tests as time passes to pinpoint outstanding data transfer or functionality problems.
After testing for some time, modify VPS settings and documentation accordingly based on your post-migration discoveries. Stay vigilant to optimize all aspects of the newly migrated ecommerce site and ensure a smooth transition to your new hosting platform.
Bottom line
After reading through this guide, your website hosting should never hold your online store back from success again. Migrating to VPS hosting for your ecommerce store can be the answer to hitting profitability metrics and success benchmarks for years to come.
Following these migration and VPS optimization best practices can put you miles ahead of your competition. Of course, it helps to have decades of ecommerce hosting experience on your side.
The experts at Liquid Web are here to help. Our team has decades of ecommerce experience, and our ecommerce hosting packages give you everything you need to succeed in the digital marketplace.
Contact us today and discover how Liquid Web managed VPS hosting can supercharge your store. Or read our ultimate guide to VPS hosting now.