eWay Corp If you run an eCommerce store with increasing traffic, it is important to plan ahead and choose a provider that is going to ensure that your site is available and able to serve requests to thousands if not millions of customers a month that come to buy items on your store. Ensuring the right customer experience with low load times and regular updates can go a long way in building customer loyalty to your brand and website. This usually involves setting up a team of qualified webmasters, systems administrators and staff to maintain and update your store on a regular basis. If your store fails, your business fails.
What is Managed Hosting?
Managed Hosting is a service that is provided by a hosting company or partner who is entrusted to run and manage your IT infrastructure so that you can focus on customer support and business development. Your service provider will take care of the servers, operating systems, software, updates and patches, security and all related services for your business.
Why do you need Managed Hosting?
While the internet has made reaching people so much easier, it has also increased the scale of competitiveness. Customer engagement is a critical factor for success of an online businesses today. People want to spend time on the website and know more about your business before becoming customers. If your website’s user experience is poor, visitors will simply move to another option. Would you use your credit card and buy something from an online store that displays security warnings when you enter the website?
If your eCommerce store does not generate confidence, experiences high load times, displays security warnings or provides patchy service you will experience a high drop-off(bounce) rate and lose prospective customers. Now not every business has the money to maintain a large inhouse staff to maintain their website. This is where managed hosting comes into play. For a small monthly fee, you can delegate the maintenance of your eCommerce store to a hosting partner and enjoy the benefits of a hassle-free customer experience. This service is not just about site maintenance or managing an eCommerce platform. However, these services transform your website from mere online presence to a relatable business resource that generates revenue for your business.
What is included in Managed Hosting?
1. Website Availability
Downtime means loss of business. It is important to choose a provider that can ensure that your website is available 99% of the time. This happens when you sign up for a service with a guaranteed SLA with round the clock monitoring. The service provider can set a disaster recovery system so that you have a fall-back process in place in case of crashes or hacks. Service technicians are trained and experienced in maintaining services and ensuring that website loads quickly and stays up.
2. Security
eCommerce stores are on the receiving end of numerous online attacks. Most of these problems are due to a lack of professional site maintenance. Ensuring that your website is secured against hacking attempts, DDoS, viruses, malware, injection attacks, phishing, ransomware, data theft takes effort, time and knowledge. A service provider can setup a process to prevent attacks, block viruses and secure your data so that your store can carry on the business of selling. By setting up a firewall, ensuring that your software is patched regularly with the latest updates, installing a SSL certificate and monitoring the site on a regular basis, a provider can protect and secure your website and prevent it from being blacklisted.
3. Scalability
Managed Hosting on the cloud provides you another mechanism to quickly scale up your operations if the holiday season is around the corner. Scale servers horizontally (add instances) or vertically (increase your Processing power, Memory or Storage) to suit the traffic requirements of seasonal sales and promotions. You are not charged any fixed costs for hiring servers or networking equipment. You only pay for what you use and have your systems scaled up or down in a few hours to meet increasing or decreasing demand for services.
4. Preventive Maintenance
As part of managed hosting service, regular preventive maintenance is undertaken. As part of this maintenance, the website codebase and database are backed up. A security scan is undertaken to identify possible malware. An online check is done to ensure that the website is not blacklisted with any of the service providers. Error logs are exported and viewed for possible exceptions and spikes in traffic monitored. This process ensures that the website is healthy and able to provide a trouble free browsing experience.
5. Reliability
When you move your site to managed hosting you can be assured that the store will be managed by professionals. There are too many hosting companies on the internet but most of them are unfit to run a mission critical store for businesses. If your website goes down so does the business. Also, dealing directly with a web hosting company means slow response times, poor customer service and wasted time. All these troubles go away if you take a managed hosting plan from a service provider who will do everything for you.
About eWay Corp
eWay Corp is Amazon Web Services Consulting Partner and Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider. We offer Managed Hosting services to businesses running eCommerce stores of all sizes and eliminate the need to setup your own team of specialists to maintain your website. Contact us today to find out how we can help your business or visit our website.
