Hosting Considerations for an E-commerce Business

More and more businesses are moving their propositions online so that they can interact with their customers wherever they are the world. Shops that were previously restricted to trading in local markets can now sell their products nationally and in many cases globally. Others have reaped the benefits of reducing their overheads such as rent and boosting their profit margins as a result. As the .com bubble of the early 2000s demonstrated however it isn’t simply a gold rush. To have an effective and competitive online proposition, an e-commerce site needs to perform well, have high uptime, process requests quickly and smoothly and be secure whenever a user interacts with it. The following article aims, therefore, to provide a quick guide to the elements that businesses should consider when choosing a hosting platform for their e-commerce site. By addressing these considerations it should maximise the likelihood of the site performing well when required, under whatever is asked of it, without it going offline. For an e-commerce site these performance criteria are even more important as poor performance/user experiences can deter customers, down time can lead to lost transactions and in worst case scenarios site errors can even have financial repercussions for the customer.

- Part 1 - Hardware - Bandwidth One of the key considerations for a site where performance - the responsiveness of user interactions, seamless user experience, page load times - is paramount is to ensure that the site benefits from high bandwidth connections. In other words, that the site is able to send and receive large amounts of data at any given time. For e-commerce sites this is a particular consideration because the site may be required to process high volumes of user generated transactions at given points in time, and, whilst a sluggish site may put users off using the site again, actual failures to process the transactions can have financial consequences for both the business and the customer. The use of a data center location to host the web server will allow a business to access higher bandwidth connections than they may be able to implement in their own location, particularly as data centers are often positioned on the internet backbone. Plumping for a dedicated server package also ensures that the network connections for the web server are not shared with any other sites and that the e-commerce business therefore has access to the entire bandwidth capacity of that connection. Where websites share servers and consequently network connections, they will compete for that bandwidth and if one site has a spike in traffic it may take away bandwidth resource from the other(s). Disk Space & CPU The provisioning of server space and processing power is a defining feature of many of the various hosting packages that are available on the market. Often

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platforms will be described as dedicated hosting/server or shared hosting/server for example depending on whether they give the website access to the whole server - entire disk space and processing power - or share that resource amongst multiple sites in some form. Sites that are likely to place high demands on the processing capabilities of their server because they request a lot of data, and/or sites that need to store a large amount of content (information in databases, page files etc), both of which e-commerce sites are a prime example, benefit from being hosted on a dedicated server. E-commerce sites usually need to send, receive and store a lot of information, not just transaction data but (e.g. product) page content as well. With a dedicated package they won’t be in competition with any other sites for the use of processing power and will, by definition, have access to a greater amount of disk space, the entirety of their server’s disk space. As an alternative, business hosting in the cloud, accessing pooled server space and computing power on demand, can also be a suitable option for achieving the capacity that e-commerce sites may need to handle the data they generate. This storage capacity can be accessed as and when the site needs it and theoretically without a practical ceiling as far as most businesses are concerned.

- Part 2 - Performance - Of course if an e-commerce site has recurring down time or reliability issues, the consumer may be put off using that site due to the expected hassle it may cause them if, for example, they are half way through a purchase when things go wrong. In addition reliability, stability and a lack of error messages can, for many users, be a good indicator of a site’s authority, its trustworthiness even, and those are important factors for a consumer when they are parting with their hard-earned money. What’s more any amount of downtime can be money down the drain, lost sales not to mention lost advertising and exposure. ScalabilityThis consideration overlaps considerably with those mentioned in the previous installment of this article - access to bandwidth, disk space and processing resource - but it is a key factor in its own right in that it is important to consider, not just the current activity on the site and the demands it places on the hosting platform but also, potential fluctuations in this activity and the potential demands posed in the future if the business is to grow or diversify. If the site’s demands on its hosting platform are likely to fluctuate day-to-day then the hosting platform should have spare capacity in its hardware resource to ensure that these peaks can be met without performance or downtime issues, whereas if the e-commerce business’s future propositions are likely to place grater demands on its servers, there should at least be a plan in place to scale up the capacity at the right time. As suggested before, a dedicated server can offer the extra capacity, bandwidth, server resource etc, to cope with fluctuating demands without suffering from the competition of shared servers. Adding a managed hosting element can also ensure that any such fluctuations can be monitored, identified and responded to

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as quickly as possible whilst future changes in the platform can be planned and implemented effectively. In terms of responsive scalability however, cloud hosting offers the most suitable option as it allows providers to offer extra resource on demand, instantaneously. Depending on the package the capacity is always there and the e-commerce site can simply tap into it as it is required. Reliable SupportDue to the complexities of e-commerce sites, the aforementioned demands of traffic levels, dynamic content and secure processing and storage of information, together with the more severe consequences if anything were to go wrong, the ability understand the requirements of the platform, configure it accordingly and then respond to changes is key. That is to respond to changes in demand, reconfiguring the platform or scaling it as described above, as well as responding to failures. For most businesses, rather than employ their own internal technicians who have the expertise to manage their web servers, the more economical solution is to sign up to a managed hosting platform. The term itself is used by different hosting providers to describe differing levels of support but a typical fully managed platform will offer such advantages as round-the-clock telephone support, site/server monitoring, bespoke configuration and set up, and back up management - all the things that increase the chances of the site being on the right platform in the first place, minimising the scope for failures to occur at all whilst increasing the ability to deal with unforeseen issues that do arise. Ultimately with all the considerations made above, things can still go wrong and so it is certainly worth taking into account not just how the hosting platform responds to changes in demand but also how it responds if problems are unfortunately encountered. Managed hosting can, by some providers, be packaged up and termed as business hosting to target the enterprise market because this level of management will provide the assurances that enterprise and especially e-commerce operations require. Reliable HardwarePackages which are described as managed hosting often incorporate a dedicated server which is ideal for hosting an e-commerce site as mentioned above but it is always worth checking because providers can offer management of hosting platforms for any type of server set up. Dedicate servers do provide the best assurances of a reliable platform. Sites hosted on dedicated servers are not at risk from other sites introducing viruses to the platform or the activities of those sites and their owners causing the software platforms (operating systems etc) or the hardware to fail, as can be the case with shared hosting. Again, as mentioned above, the dedicated access to hardware resource means that spikes in traffic for example would not overload the site and its hosting causing downtime. In contrast sites on shared platforms are not only subject to lower ceilings at which their own fluctuating activity could cause server side issues but they will

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be affected if other sites hosted on the same servers have their own spikes in activity. As an alternative to the stability of dedicated hosting, the mechanics of cloud hosting can also provide the reliability that e-commerce sites require. Cloud hosting utilises a pool of hardware resource spread across multiple servers, often multiple data centers, and this ensures that the they do not have single points of failure. If a physical server goes down, the cloud’s virtual server and therefore the site won’t. Even if something were to compromise an entire data center, the site would most likely remain online (depending on the package).

- Part 3 - Security - One particular feature of an e-commerce web site that often sets their hosting requirements apart from those of other brochure sites for example is the fact that they handle, almost by definition, personal and financially sensitive information. Therefore, an e-commerce site’s hosting platform must have measures in place to ensure that this information is kept secure. E-commerce RisksE-commerce websites are usually required to process and store customers’ personal details. These details include payment information, names and addresses and even their choice of purchase. The payment details have more obvious financial risks associated with them, but customers’ names and addresses could also be used by criminals for the purposes of identity theft and fraud amongst other things. Even the details of an individual’s purchases may have undesired consequences if they were to get into the public domain (particularly in some product markets). There are many risks posed to the data that e-commerce sites process; threats from hackers, who are attempting to access the server itself and the data that is stored on it, viruses which may harvest the data or give access to these hackers, and viruses that simply corrupt the data or that cause failures in the platforms where the data is stored. Malicious viruses for example might be written with no intention other than to just wipe a server or computer. Dedicated SecurityAs with many of the challenges faced by e-commerce sites, the most appropriate solution for this requirement is to choose a dedicated server. This type of hosting platform offers the most protection against the spread of viruses and against hackers attempting to access the site’s files. Sites which share servers, however, are more vulnerable to such threats from the presence of other sites on the server which may not be well protected themselves, especially where they also share software such as operating systems and database support. Platforms which use a virtual partition to create virtual private servers, or virtual dedicated servers as they may be described, will introduce greater barriers to viruses and hackers, than simple shared servers. Their operating systems will be distinct, however, because they will still share the same physical server and they will retain

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some of the vulnerabilities associated with that. Cloud SecurityMany e-commerce businesses who are attracted by the reliability and scalability benefits of cloud hosting mentioned in the previous installment of this article also have concerns over the security of the platform due to its use of a multitude of shared servers across vast networks. However, the growing use of technologies such as MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching - a way of transmitting data), Virtual Data Centres (VDC - a network of connected virtualised cloud servers) and carrier clouds (where the cloud is carried on wide area networks, WAN, distinct from the internet) is ensuring that the security of the information stored on the virtualised servers and transmitted between them is reaching higher and higher levels, bringing the benefits of cloud hosting into the reacb of these e-commerce businesses. Data Center SecurityFinally, any server within a data center will benefit from the state-of-the-art security that most data center buildings have installed to prevent anyone, who shouldn’t be able to, accessing the servers in situ. Consequently, one option for companies looking to invest into their own servers rather than renting from a hosting provider, but who still need the security of the data center location, is to choose a colocation hosting option. With this choice they simply rent the space in the server racks from the provider, into which they can house their own servers. © Stuart Mitchell 2012

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