How Does The Cloud Benefit eCommerce Retailers?

It is impossible to build a successful eCommerce business on slow and unreliable infrastructure. Performance, redundancy, and scalability shape the shopping experience of every customer. Poor experiences lead to low eCommerce conversion rates, so it is in the interest of retailers to choose an infrastructure solution that is fast, flexible, and reliable. There is no shortage of infrastructure options, from shared hosting to clusters of dedicated servers, but cloud platforms offer the optimal balance of cost, performance, and flexibility.

Scalability

The scalability of a hosting platform describes how quickly it can adapt to changing demand. This is particularly important to eCommerce retailers who experience seasonal or temporary peaks in the number of shoppers using their store at the same time. The holiday season — Black Friday and Cyber Monday, in particular — often demands infrastructure with several times the capacity needed on an average day.

The cloud is the most scalable server hosting option. New servers can be added in seconds and deleted just as quickly. Retailers only pay for the resources they use. Cloud scalability is ideal for eCommerce because it allows retailers to increase capacity on busy days (or busy hours) and reduce it when there is less demand, a level of flexibility that is not possible with dedicated servers.

Ease Of Use

Online retailers who use Steadfast Simplicity Cloud have several options for managing and scaling their cloud platform. An intuitive web interface can be used to scale, deploy, or remove servers. The same capabilities are available via an API that can be used to script and automate servers.

But many retailers who use Steadfast Simplicity Cloud call or email our support teams and let us implement the necessary changes. Unlike other cloud platforms, Steadfast Simplicity Cloud really is simple to use because our team of experienced cloud specialists can do the technical work for you.

Performance

Performance is critical to providing a pleasant shopping experience: research has shown that slow product pages and shopping carts reduce sales. Performance is related to scalability — a store that doesn’t have enough resources will be slow — but there are other important factors, including filesystem and database performance, network latency, and geographic location.

Steadfast Simplicity Cloud is engineered for optimal performance, with state-of-the-art components and highly optimized network connectivity. Also, Steadfast will work with you to build a custom public or private cloud that maximizes performance for your store.

Reliability

High Availability is the gold standard of infrastructure reliability. A Highly Available system is designed to have no point of failure without a redundant alternative ready to take over: if a server fails another should be ready to take its place, if a bandwidth provider suffers downtime an alternative should be available immediately, and so on for every component of the platform.

Steadfast Simplicity Cloud is a highly available cloud platform engineered for maximum uptime and reliability. With Steadfast’s 99.99% Total Availability Uptime Service Level Agreement, retailers can be confident that their store will be available to customers round the clock, every day of the year.

To find out how Steadfast Simplicity Cloud can bring reliability, scalability, and optimal performance to your eCommerce store, contact our cloud team today for a free consultation.