7 Signs Your E-Commerce Hosting Solution is Doing More Harm Than Good
According to Forrester Research, 60 percent of all U.S. retail sales will be "web-influenced" in 2017 — i.e., influenced by the internet, either as a direct e-commerce transaction or through shoppers’ research of merchandise online. To capture more online dollars, many retailers are stepping up their web game, investing in content-heavy sites to attract and engage users. In fact, 69 percent of North American marketers say dynamic, personalized content is important for their website. At the end of the day, however, no matter how sophisticated or attractive a website may be, it must load quickly and perform seamlessly.
For many online retailers, it's hard to pinpoint the performance problems that are symptoms of a failing hosting solution vs. those that result from just poorly designed web assets. To stop organizations from scratching their heads on this issue, here's a list of the top seven signs that your hosting solution is the culprit:
1. Your site keeps crashing. In 2012, Irish betting company Paddy Power suffered a website crash before the Grand National horse race. The site was only down for 20 minutes, coming back up 15 minutes before the race. Even in such a short time frame, the outage was costly for Paddy Power, as so many other betting websites were competing for gamblers’ attention that same day.
Time and again I've seen this scenario play out: websites crash and consumers shop elsewhere. In fact, for one in six enterprises, a single hour of downtime can cost more than $1 million and 127 million man-hours of productivity. Even when revenue isn't on the line, outages can lead to poor reputation and negative site reviews, making this the No. 1 sign that your hosting solution isn't effective.
2. Your provider's technical support is unreliable. To date, there's no such thing as 100 percent uptime, and even hosting providers with the highest service-level agreements (SLAs) and the most capable solutions may at some point face an outage. Then what? Can you call your hosting provider? Will you rely on its team to resolve the issue?
