The world of e-commerce can be difficult to navigate. With high traffic to your site and lots of business ordeals to take care of, there comes a point where you need to decide whether you might need to outsource an e-commerce accountant or if you can manage your business on your own.
But, if there’s anything you can do to help your business on your own, so that you can focus on other business orders without the help of outsourcers, setting up your own dedicated server would be beneficial to get a head start. When your business reaches a certain threshold of activity regularly, it is in your best interest to invest in a dedicated server to boost your website’s response time, improve your availability, and build a professional bond of trust with your clients.
Here are how a dedicated server differs from a cloud server and how one can work wonders for your e-commerce business.
What Is a Dedicated Server?
A dedicated server is, as the name suggests, a server dedicated to the electronic tasks your organization requires, offering performance on industry-grade hardware used to power business activities.
Of course, a dedicated server’s resources are for your use alone, so the CPU, RAM, and disk space are entirely dedicated to the interests of your business, offering a major advantage in speed and administration.
Administrators can use dedicated servers for web hosting, database management, email hosting, and resale hosting.
The Pros of Dedicated Servers
The main reason many large businesses rely on dedicated servers is their high performance. The simple fact that you aren’t sharing resources with another entity frees up so much hardware performance from the server to run any tasks you place upon it.
The servers are up 24/7, are accessible by IT for quick repairs, and are rarely subject to viruses as a perk of their isolated nature. Some of the top benefits of a dedicated server include the following:
- Improved Security: A dedicated server does not require linking to other data like a cloud-based service. With a dedicated server, you and you alone have autonomy over your website’s security, allowing you to optimize it per your needs and offer a complete guarantee of the safety of your client’s personal information.
- Better Server Control: Managing your server is vital to monitoring the growth of your business and laying out your online reputation the way you want it. A dedicated server gives you control over your server to manage your business, and adding Syslog server monitoring is an essential step to ensuring that your server runs smoothly.
- Dedicated Traffic Handling: A dedicated server can handle large workloads around the clock, mainly because its resources aren’t dependent on another cloud-based service running on the same server.
- Quicker Load Times: Similarly, the powerful hosting option of a dedicated server ensures that your website will have faster load times and be more responsible for inputs, reducing customer frustration and building trust in the professionalism of your business.
- More Powerful Hardware: Dedicated server-grade CPUs and RAM are powerful and constructed from high-quality parts, capable of efficiently handling high volumes of web traffic. You also have access to a selection of specialized Operating Systems (OS).
Dedicated Server vs. Cloud-Based Service
A dedicated server addresses your business needs anytime, anywhere, and provides you with sole use of your own network. On the other hand, cloud-based servers exist in a virtual environment where many different businesses share virtual resources.
While private cloud services can be very powerful, scalable, and offer excellent performance, they are not sustainable for growing e-commerce businesses, especially ones that require high performance all the time.
Dedicated servers provide 24/7 uptime and constant high performance, ideal for e-commerce solutions, while cloud servers are beneficial for businesses starting to scale, seasonal businesses, and other particular hosting solutions. Types of online companies that may rely on dedicated servers include:
- Large websites with lots of concurrent users and high traffic
- Ecommerce websites needing to process payments and orders
- News outlets
- Online banking
- Streaming services
- Online education platforms
- Storage and backup hosting services
Why Do E-commerce Businesses Need a Dedicated Server?
At the end of the day, how you choose to run your business is up to you. Still, when it comes to the e-commerce sector, it’s generally agreed that a dedicated server is the definitive way to go once your business reaches a certain threshold.
Dedicated servers take a lot of work—expenses, maintenance, security—but if your e-commerce business is taking off, netting you high volumes of traffic, then the effectiveness of a dedicated server in driving conversions far outweighs the cost of maintenance.
Setting aside the improved security and server autonomy, the most important aspect of a dedicated server for e-commerce is that it always offers exceptional user service. With a cloud server, you always risk having slow load times and poor reception when the server is in high demand.
You might not think such a small inconvenience would make prospective customers click off your website, but it certainly can. Imagine your e-commerce business is running a sale over the holidays. If a cloud server is hosting your website, you’re likely sharing resources with other companies that also experience high demand over the holidays.
As such, your website can be sluggish and unresponsive (a business impact metric that’s hard to evaluate), causing lots of users to leave your website out of frustration. This can prove damning for businesses trying to rank high on Google’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO), as one of its algorithms evaluates load time, assessing penalties whenever users close their window before the website loads.
Convenience and marketing are still the leading factors of platform success, so if you want to capitalize on your business growth, a dedicated server is an integral part of that growth process.
E-commerce platforms, by design, run in high demand at different points throughout the year. If your business is in the growth phase, there’s nothing wrong with using a cloud-based service to get you started. As you begin to notice an uptick in traffic to your website, making the switch is an important business decision.
The Bottom Line
The decision between a dedicated server or a cloud-based server rests in your hands. Still, there’s certainly a precedent for businesses getting large volumes of traffic to their websites choosing dedicated servers. That’s certainly true of the e-commerce market, which depends on reliable uptime to drive conversions and give users a positive experience.
It may cause more significant expense and a little more work to maintain a dedicated server, but it will pay great dividends in the long run, especially for growing businesses. Consumers value expedient and efficient transactions, and if they must wait for your website to open or for transactions to go through, they will likely find a better place to do their business.
