Although IT guys seem to get fed of the word ‘cloud’ since it is mentioned almost to the level of hype. We need to get accustomed to the buzz around cloud because there is a perpetual development going in the field of cloud computing and developers around the world are exploring innovative ways to adopt cloud systems software, and platforms to accomplish diverse tasks to simplify and expedite business processes.
Relevance of cloud in ecommerce
One of the similar attempts is to leverage cloud servers to facilitate ecommerce applications. The new initiative is met with some resistance by few ecommerce site owners due to the uncertainty of performance being an entirely new approach. The initial level of inertia is perfectly understandable.
According to several surveys and studies, growth of ecommerce is boosted by cloud adoption. This is the reason why cloud server hosting is considered as a key to ecommerce advancement. Cloud offers wide spectrum of technical and economical benefits to ecommerce entrepreneurs.
Traditional hosting is found to be associated with significant downtime issues and are not as flexible as cloud hosting. Moreover traditional hosting lacks scalability, which is the basic requirement for ecommerce business that is influenced by unpredictable traffic and frequent events of traffic spikes.
Ecommerce hosting by using cloud server has its own advantages because most of the traditional servers are bound to get obsolete in very near future. We can expect the following advantages of using cloud servers for ecommerce hosting.
Popularity of ecommerce is primarily attributed to the fact that modern shoppers hate to wait in queues at checkout counters in malls and supermarkets. They are attracted to ecommerce due to the speed of ordering and checking out. Cloud server hosting accelerates site speed of ecommerce applications to a great extent.
Ease of managing peak time demands
As mentioned earlier, cloud servers are highly sought after by ecommerce merchants due to excellent scalability. Scalability of cloud solutions facilitates ecommerce websites to improve resource availability dynamically. The basic reason for dynamic and on demand scalability in cloud environment is the presence of multiple servers in a cloud environment. These help instant scaling of resources without impacting active sessions. Cloud servers are able to handle incremental traffic in a more efficient way than conventional on site servers. Ecommerce vendors can be assured of seamless resource availability in any given situation. On the other hand, cloud hosting also allows down scaling of resources as soon as peak time demands subside. By turning off the excess resources in response to steadying of traffic, ecommerce merchants are able to save on resource expenditure to improve business profits.
Benefits of economy
Since cloud solutions are essentially based on utility payment models, clients are required to pay only for the resources that are being consumed. Cloud adoption also relieves clients from spending heavily on procurement of costly infrastructure, system maintenance, and application updates. This explains why cloud hosting is more economical than maintaining in-house IT infrastructure. Cloud computing is highly regarded for cost efficiency and helps enterprise access wide gamut of services, databases, ad applications made available easily by cloud vendors. Administrators of ecommerce ventures can access all important services by adopting cloud solutions that are flexible, economical, and scalable.
Improved competitiveness
Cloud is a great leveler. It empowers even small ecommerce stores to gain flexibility and scalability to compete with large ecommerce vendors. Cloud based ecommerce applications improve their ability to serve customers by providing state of the art features that are usually found with portals of big ecommerce companies. Cloud computing has capability to elevate small commerce sites to greater heights of customer satisfaction at highly reasonable cost of hosting.
Freedom from downtime
Unplanned outage or downtime can result in catastrophic consequences especially for ecommerce sites. This can also result in loss of mission critical data and also impact revenues due to disruption in availability of ecommerce site. Downtime can also lead to loss of customers since it can severely degrade reputation of ecommerce business that was earned trough sweat and blood. No event of system crash or hardware failure can impact cloud based ecommerce hosting and the business can continue in normal way due to absence of single point of failure.
Outstanding accessibility
Ecommerce entrepreneurs are able to easily access their business without any restriction of location or time. Improved accessibility of cloud services helps users perform tasks by using simple web browsers from any handheld device such as a smart-phone. What’s more, cloud also enables cost saving because users need not purchase costly hardware or software equipment. Thanks to outstanding accessibility, cloud servers help streamlining of businesses and provide ease of access to vendors, customers, and employees.
In conclusion
There is hardly any doubt that cloud solutions are posed to transform ecommerce industry by opening up brand new avenues to ecommerce merchants. The fascinating array of competitive advantages offered by cloud is sure to boost the entire ecommerce marketplace in time to come.