An e-commerce website is a busy place with potentially thousands of sales and financial transactions happening simultaneously. It could receive millions of visitors every day. Hence, an e-commerce site needs a strong backend to handle all the stress of traffic. Cloud Server Hosting seems to be an ideal backend for an e-commerce website with its fast performance and easy scalability. And every Cloud Hosting plan offers these features. All this together makes Cloud Server Hosting a powerful hosting solution.
But come festivals, and any e-commerce website worth the salt sees a massive surge in incoming traffic. This can be attributed to the holiday rush brought on by the abundance of festival discounts and offers put out by the portals. If they’re not prepared for the surge, the site will crash under the onslaught. But that rarely happens, if at all.
Let’s see how you can manage traffic surges on your e-commerce website.
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Fortify against downtime
Downtime is the worst thing that can happen to an e-commerce site during the holiday rush. But a good Cloud Hosting plan can mitigate this risk. The plan, combined with the easy scalability of Cloud Hosting will ensure that the website doesn’t go down unexpectedly. When you buy Cloud Hosting, consider the future growth while choosing a plan. Be prepared to add more resources at a moment’s notice.
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Optimize your hosting
No amount of resources will be enough unless they are optimized for performance. Keep your hosting environment updated and maintained to get the best performance out of it. Install updates as soon as you get them. Carry out maintenance at recommended intervals. Be sure to keep your hosting space clean. Remove any unwanted extensions and delete unused files like images and plugins. It will boost your server’s performance.
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Increase security
Hackers can take advantage of the surge in traffic to sneak in or infect your website with malware. If that happens, you will be putting the financial and private data of your customers, like their home address and contact information, at risk. But you can counter this by increasing your security measures before the surge in traffic happens. Implement a two-step authentication process and update your SSL certificate.
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Optimize for mobile
More than half the traffic of an e-commerce website comes in through mobile devices. It makes sense as more people have smartphones than computers. Even though it is scalable Cloud Hosting has to be optimized for mobile, which is a good thing because it typically means a lesser strain on the resources. Optimizing for mobile also improves the overall user experience, which in turn leads to higher sales.
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Use a CDN
A CDN (Content Delivery Network) boosts page load speeds by a significant amount. It duplicates your website data across a global network of servers created specifically for the purpose. Whenever a new user request comes in, the CDN serves it from the server closest to the user, cutting down response time. But this arrangement will also enable a website to handle traffic surges without buckling under pressure.
Cloud Hosting in India is a popular option for its strong performance, and all these measures will help strengthen it. But they will work only if you are prepared, and implement them well in advance.