Why multi-clustering is the ultimate ecommerce solution for the holiday season
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After making it through Black Friday and Cyber Monday hustle and bustle, we’re rapidly approaching the holiday ecommerce season. Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic, online shopping has been on the rise and this trend won’t go away anytime soon. But how can an ecommerce business translate this evolving shopping behavior into recurring revenue?
For starters, you’ll want to optimize your site and ensure that all your potential customers are provided with an excellent navigating experience.
Besides bad search engine optimization (SEO) and non-existent e-marketing campaigns, nothing spells “low sales” like an online store with web pages loading for ages and a shopping cart failing to respond properly. In short, if you want to convert your holiday marketing campaign into cold hard cash, your site’s performance must be one of your top priorities.
After all, Christmas and New Year are probably the most profitable periods for any online store and part of boosting your sales success is optimizing your site at peak traffic times.
Alright, but what’s the simplest way to ensure your online store stays speedy, stable, and secure during peak periods? It’s switching to a multi-clustering hosting model.
If you’re not sure what multi-clustering is and how it can support your online store to make it through the holiday season, stay tuned.
Things to know about ecommerce
Electronic commerce, or e-commerce for short, refers to the process of buying and selling products and services via the Internet. In simple terms, it’s an online equivalent of a traditional brick-and-mortar store and it can exist alongside it. E-commerce exists as a part of an industry known as e-business and it includes all processes that are required for running an online store.
An ecommerce website is an online storefront where you can showcase your products and services, sell them, draw in new customers, and hopefully turn them into loyal clients.
The main benefits of ecommerce include convenience, an ability to add a wider variety of products, lower start-up costs, international sales capability, and an excellent starting point for cross-platform marketing campaigns.
However, there are quite a few drawbacks as well and most of them can be attributed to the technical challenges of running an online store - namely, the site’s performance. If your site crashes down at peak traffic times it will result in a loss of revenue, income, and customer loyalty.
One way to make sure your ecommerce site’s performance shines through and shows your business in the best possible light is to pick out a reliable, robust, and performance-focused web hosting service that’ll provide you with a perfect e-commerce hosting solution.
How does web hosting help ecommerce?
Web hosting is the backbone of ecommerce. Without a solid, secure, and scalable web hosting service there can’t be an ecommerce store. For starters, it wouldn’t have a place to live on the internet, spread its wings, and fly. While there’s an option to self-host, it requires a lot of responsibility and technical know-how.
Some of the main advantages of hosting your online store on a professional ecommerce hosting platform include strong security, powerful performance, and a dedicated technical support team. However, as an ecommerce site is one of the most complex site types, there’s no one-size-fits-all sort of solution for it.
Also, you’ll want to choose a stable, scalable, and customizable ecommerce solution that can keep up with your store’s expansion and support its success.
How clustering can help your online store
Server clustering is one of the most effective yet budget-friendly methods to ensure your e-commerce store provides presentable performance during peak traffic periods such as the holiday season. By deploying redundant infrastructure as a part of your e-commerce solution, clustering can help your store sustain its stability, security, and speedy performance.
Cluster hosting is also famous for its scalability and flexibility. When a need for additional servers arises - whether due to increasing site traffic or plans to add extra features - you can simply scale up your solution. And it's as simple to scale it down as well. No damage will be done to your environment - no downtime, no slow performance, and no losing sales.
What is the clustering model?
The terms “server cluster” and “clustering model” refer to a collection of separate servers that are working simultaneously under a single IP address to provide users with high availability and fast performance. If one server (also called a node) in a cluster fails, another one takes over and thus helps prevent any amount of downtime - downtime is bad for business.
Also, if the performance of one of these servers is compromised or any service on it stops working, the whole workload will be swiftly shifted to another server. This isn’t only a life-saver for an ecommerce store, but also allows stronger security of your sensitive data.
Why is managed clustering a game-changer?
Multi-clustering model allows next-level availability, spectacular scalability, and stellar performance. While this can be your best bet during peak traffic times such as the holiday rush, clustering can also be a game-changer for your business.
However, before beginning to configure your cluster, make sure you have one managed clustering server at the very least. Since the multi-clustering model involves professional cluster management, this will let you focus on boosting your business rather than tackling the technical stuff or hiring an entire technical team to do so. So, your host will take care of all the tiresome stuff such as system monitoring, maintenance, hardware replacements, and so on.
Types of clustering
Not surprisingly, there are several types of clustering: single data center cluster, multi-data center cluster, and multi-region cluster - and they are exactly what they sound like.
1. Single data center cluster: with this type of clustering you’ll get several servers connected into a single cluster inside a single data center. This setup consists of two load balancers (one of them will be on standby) and several servers that contain your data - including your ecommerce site or sites.
2. Multi-data center cluster: as this name implies, this clustering model can be deployed in multiple data centers. As you can have clusters in data centers across the world, if one of them stops working, the other one will take over in no time. This clustering type includes more servers than the previous one which makes it somewhat pricey in comparison.
3. Multi-region cluster: this type of clustering solution is reserved for sites with the highest traffic and corporations that must provide perfect site performance across the world. Besides being deployed in multiple data centers, this clustering type must be active all the time. This is the most costly type out of the three as it provides 100% uptime.
Choose the right model
Choosing a multi-clustering hosting model is one of the smartest strategies for getting your ecommerce site ready to take on traffic spikes during the holiday rush.
It’ll help you preserve powerful performance, strong security, and scale up/down your hosting solution to boost your sales and profitability.
So, make a switch to multi-clustering hosting right now and make sure your ecommerce site is ready to conquer the e-market.
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