Are you planning to launch your e-commerce website?
In case you are, then there are a few things you need to address. For any website to survive in the online space, one thing which requires maximum consideration is none other but the website’s availability on the Internet.
Do you know thousands of eCommerce startups fail annually just because of website downtime experiences? Each year businesses lose billions of dollars in sales because their websites are unavailable to sell relevant products in the online space due to non-availability.
Website success depends much on the hosting platform you’re using to run your website.
While there are plenty of hosting options in the market, such as shared hosting, VPS hosting, managed cloud hosting, etc., a dedicated hosting service is, without a doubt, the perfect hosting option.
But more on hosting services later… Let’s learn what are some of the reasons why eCommerce websites typically crash?
Are you an entrepreneur investing budgets in aggressive marketing campaigns & influencer marketing? Here are four reasons why your eCommerce store can experience crashes.
Reason # 1: Coding Errors Can Shutdown your eCommerce Stores
One of the leading reasons why many eCommerce websites experience downtime is because of coding errors. If your eCommerce website has a bad code, it is more likely your eCommerce store will experience a downtime. Such errors normally occur when a developer runs a code update, and the code turns out to be a buggy one. Typically, a developer forgets to test the code before deployment, and therefore, the website underperforms when the code becomes a part of it. When you are planning to update a code, it is always advised for the developer to make a habit of doing it in the staging environment.
But is this the only reason? Well, not exactly.
Many website owners can experience coding errors when installing certain site plugins or extensions at the backend of the website. The problem usually occurs when your eCommerce store is running on a platform such as WooCommerce for WordPress or Magento. Many plugins or extensions are riddled with bad code patches as they are rarely tested or updated post-deployment.
Therefore, when you’re adding a plugin or an extension to your site, make sure it comes from a reliable source.
Reason # 2: Traffic Surges Can Often End-Up in Downtimes
Another reason why many eCommerce websites’ suffer downtime is the increased number of online visitors. During the holiday season, there are millions of shoppers who are searching for products online. At times, if that particular product is available on your website and you’ve marketed it using social media, a great number of online visitors normally drops in as a customer on your website.
If your server isn’t auto-scalable or is running on limited resources, there’s a high chance your website will fail to adjust the traffic influx and bring your online visitors’ experience to a crawl. As a result, many visitors choose an alternative to purchasing the same product from someplace else in the online landscape.
Most website crashes occur during the holiday season.
So when the holiday season is around the corner, make sure your website servers aren’t underprovisioned.
Reason # 3: Beware of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks
Culprits are around every corner, and they are also abundantly present in the online space. A DDoS attack is one of the common ways to impact a website’s speed & functionality magnanimously.
A DDoS attack is a specific type of attack where a hacker sends malicious traffic to your online storefront. As a result, your website gets an influx of information from varied sources & it suffers a great downtime.
It’s not like DDoS attacks appeared on the online radars recently.
Such attacks have been around for ages. They are devious, malicious, and are incredibly easy to ■■■■■■■. It’s what makes these attacks lethal for the online space. It can create gateways for many other types of dangerous cybercriminal incidents such as intrusions, malware infections, credit card thefts & so on.
The best way to avoid such incidents from taking place is to deploy DDoS prevention.
Reason # 4: Cloud Providers Can Also Become a Cause of Website’s Downtime
Cloud providers can often become a leading cause why your eCommerce website can experience downtime. Many cloud data centers can succumb to failure because of natural disasters, server issues, etc. They can also go through routine maintenance checks. As a result, a cloud server may eventually experience a complete shutdown because the entire data center is going through a revamp.
Usually, it takes a data center an hour to return to life, no matter how grave the cost is. It may sound like a quick turnaround time but not so much when you’re running an eCommerce website online.
With each passing second, you’re more likely to lose thousands of customers.
And you certainly can’t afford that now, can you? If you want to make sure your cloud provider is one of the best for speed & performance, we recommend you go for a dedicated server.
They are relatively much reliable, secure and performance-oriented.
EndNote
Website downtime is a prevalent incident which many of us face in the online world. Specifically, many eCommerce websites experience downtime even though their hosting platforms promise them a 100% site uptime. But how can one be sure that they can deliver what they promise? Might we recommend that you do a bit of your research and find out which hosting platform is more rewarding for your business? Until then, take care and let us know if there are other red flags.