Today’s successful e-commerce stores rely on a range of different technologies to drive their businesses forward. Everything from website reliability, scalability and security to customer analytics, CX and inventory management involve some kind of advanced technology. Putting these in place requires not just a modern hosting solution, but a hosting provider that offers the tools, services and support that online stores need. In this post, we take a look at the hosting requirements required for e-commerce success in 2024.
The new era of e-commerce
Customer expectations about e-commerce websites evolve depending on what they experience from visiting their favourite stores. Thanks to innovations by retail giants like Amazon, those expectations have increased massively over the last few years. Customers now expect websites to be fast, reliable and secure; they want products to be easy to find, or better, recommended for them; and they like it when the entire experience is personalised. Additionally, they demand easy access to information or answers to questions, customer reviews, quick delivery times, rewards for loyalty and more.
There is plenty of evidence to show that these features are what customers are looking for. For example, 50% of people now head straight to Amazon to start searching for a product compared to only 31.5% on Google, while 77% of people seek out stores that offer reviews . According to Forbes, 74% of customers get frustrated when website content is not personalised; 70% of millennials don’t like it when marketing emails are irrelevant; and 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that provide relevant offers and recommendations . The internet is full of survey results and reports showing similar results.
To meet these consumer expectations and compete with leading websites, e-commerce companies need to follow suit. However, that means deploying the technologies that make these website features and experiences possible. Today, you can break these technologies down into two distinct groups: the first are those that the e-commerce company needs to deploy on their hosting, like customer data analytics, AI-powered product recommendation engines, chatbots and automated marketing solutions; the second are the solutions provided by the web hosting company, like high-performance servers, high availability and advanced security and backup solutions. Of course, to deploy their technologies effectively, e-commerce companies must first put the right hosting solution in place.
For more, read: 8 Ways Online Stores Can Use AI to Drive Success
Vital hosting features for e-commerce websites
The most important hosting features for today’s e-commerce websites are uptime, speed, security and scalability. Uptime is essential not just to ensure your website is always available for people to shop but also to maintain customer trust. If sites occasionally go offline, shoppers can quickly get wary. Of course, every minute offline is potentially another lost sale. Scalability plays an important role here in that it ensures websites always have the computing resources they need to stay online and perform optimally even during periods of heavy traffic or when running extensive analytics workloads.
Website loading and response times are also important. Slow sites provide a poor user experience which causes shoppers to abandon their visits and look elsewhere. It can also affect search engine ranking, which is even more important today, given that half of all consumers head straight to Amazon leaving everyone else to compete for the 31.5% who use Google.
Finally, but crucially, e-commerce businesses need their host to provide robust security solutions. Websites need advanced firewalls and intrusion prevention tools to prevent cyberattacks that can take the site offline or cause major data breaches. And if the worst should happen, they also need effective backup solutions that help them recover as quickly as possible.
Putting e-commerce technology into place
The advanced technologies e-commerce companies need to deploy in the modern marketplace also have an impact on the type of hosting they need. Aside from providing enough resources for hosting the basic website, the applications that deliver personalisation, customer data analytics, AI, machine learning and automated marketing can require not just considerable resources but also hi-performance hardware, like Intel Xeon processors and the latest NVMe SSD drives, together with specialist performance and resource monitoring and optimisation tools.
In terms of hosting solutions, this certainly has an impact on choice. The one solution that meets all these needs is cloud hosting. However, companies must also think carefully about the services offered by the provider not just the type of hosting being offered.
For more, read: How Cloud Hosting is Transforming Retail
Critical hosting services
There are some hosting services that are indispensable to modern e-commerce companies. We have already touched upon backup solutions, but this service needs further consideration. In the event of a disaster, e-commerce companies need to meet two vital objectives: one is their recovery time objective, and the other is their recovery point objective. The recovery time objective means getting their services restored and back online as quickly as possible to prevent loss of business and damage to the company’s reputation. The recovery point objective is to restore as much data as possible up to the moment when the disaster happened.
If there is a gap between a backup being taken and a disaster taking place, any orders, changes to customer information or website updates that take place in that gap cannot be restored. All that information will be lost. For online stores that see new orders, information and updates happening consistently, then a specific type of backup solution is required. In this case, one that enables online stores to automate scheduled backups to take place at the frequency needed. Just as importantly, the web host that provides this service must also enable the customer to have flexible storage and create retention policies, while safeguarding the backups via integrity checks, offsite storage and encryption. Equally important for recovery time objectives is to be able to restore data at speed. Continuous cloud-based backup solutions are ideal for this purpose.
Managed hosting is another web hosting service that has become vital for e-commerce companies. Given the increased complexity of running a tech-rich e-commerce store, in-house IT professionals might not always have the time or the experience to carry out all of the tasks required to manage their infrastructure. With a managed hosting solution, many of these tasks are taken over by the host, including server monitoring, server maintenance, operation system updates and patching and more. Additionally, companies can arrange bespoke management solutions where, if needed, the host can take over even more operations. This leaves you with more time and resources to focus on improving the site and enhancing customer experience.
As e-commerce websites become more reliant on digital technologies and require more advanced hosting solutions to deploy them, the need for 24/7 technical support is critical. Technical support, which is completely different to customer support, ensures that whenever an issue arises, there will be an expert technician, supported by a wider team, available to help you fix the problem quickly. This will go beyond giving advice too, the technical team will be able to provide hands-on assistance if required.
For more information, read: What to Look For in a Managed Cloud Provider
Conclusion
Today’s e-commerce businesses rely on advanced tools and applications to provide customers with the experiences they demand. Deploying those technologies requires a hosting solution that offers high performance, high availability and scalability. To achieve this, cloud hosting is the best option. At the same time, companies also need a cloud hosting provider that ensures security and offers continuous backups, flexible managed services and 24/7 technical support.
For e-commerce solutions that offer all these features and more, and which provide the foundations for commercial success, find out about our Cloud Hosting for mission-critical applications.
