A Retailer’s Guide to Cloud Hosting: Winning the Holiday Shopping Season

Last year’s holiday season set new records for online shopping, with e-commerce sales on Black Friday climbing more than 10 percent and Cyber Monday sales up more than 7 percent year-over-year, according to Adobe Analytics. With this year’s peak season expected to bring even higher online volumes, retailers must be ready to handle surging traffic, protect customer data, and deliver a seamless experience. Otherwise, they risk losing sales and customers' trust to competitors. The difference between a missed opportunity and a completed sale often depends on the strength and security of a retailer’s IT infrastructure.

2025 has already proven to be a challenging year for online retailers, marked by several high-profile cybersecurity incidents. The April attack on M&S by the Scattered Spider hacking group disrupted operations, compromised customer data, and impacted profits. Meanwhile, large-scale system outages — such as the recent AWS outage that affected retailers including McDonald's and Starbucks, and the Microsoft Azure outage that disrupted operations for companies like Costco and Kroger — have further underscored that performance alone isn’t enough; resilience and security must go hand in hand. To keep holiday sales ringing and reputations intact, retailers need infrastructure that scales on demand, ensures uptime, defends against evolving threats, and delivers fast, uninterrupted performance.

Meeting Demand While Keeping Sites Always On

Traffic spikes should mean more sales, but only if every shopper gets a seamless experience. Without elastic, scalable hosting, retailers risk site crashes, slow load times, and abandoned carts, especially during peak demand moments.

Scalable hosting lets retailers flex resources in real time when traffic surges, then dial back down to keep costs under control. This is a critical advantage for small or boutique retailers that don’t have the budget to maintain excess capacity. The best retail infrastructure anticipates traffic spikes before they happen, not just react once sites are under strain. However, scalability alone isn’t enough; without strong uptime and reliability, even the best-prepared sites risk losing sales.

Shoppers might wait in line at a store, but they won’t tolerate waiting online. Slow webpage speeds significantly impact a consumer’s decision to make a purchase or look elsewhere. In fact, 40 percent of shoppers will leave a website if it takes longer than three seconds to fully load. That’s why uptime is one of the most critical metrics for retail success. High-availability platforms with clear service-level agreements (SLAs) help keep sites online, while disaster recovery strategies ensure minimal disruption during outages. Reliable uptime doesn’t just save transactions; it protects brand reputation and long-term customer loyalty.

What Retailers Should Prioritize for Successful Cloud Hosting

Achieving success in the cloud means more than picking the right platform; it requires a clear framework and trusted partners who understand your unique demands to support a seamless customer experience.

Retailers can achieve this by collaborating with cloud partners who will:

• Understand your goals, performance targets, compliance, and continuity needs.
• Design tailored solutions optimized for your workload, scalability requirements, and budget.
• Carry out migration in structured stages during low-traffic periods to minimize downtime.
• Maintain long-term support with monitoring, patching, backups, and continuous optimization.

What Retailers Should Look for in the Right MSP

Performance goes beyond site design; infrastructure elements like server proximity, bandwidth, and capacity for content-heavy sites directly impact speed, conversion rates, and checkout success. To meet these demands, retailers are increasingly turning to managed service providers (MSPs) that embed resilience and scalability into their operations and offer around-the-clock support and reliable service. The right partner should fully understand the nuances of a retailer’s operations, maintain a close working relationship, anticipate high-traffic periods, and adapt flexibly to evolving business needs to ensure consistent performance when it matters most.

In an era when cybersecurity threats are rapidly evolving, having a strong, proactive security strategy is just as critical as site performance. Retailers need partners who not only optimize infrastructure but also safeguard it, ensuring that customer trust and data integrity remain uncompromised.

Retailers should prioritize partners who can:

• Offer dynamic scalability to handle traffic spikes without wasteful overspending.
• Guarantee uptime with clear SLAs, backed by high availability and redundancy.
• Deliver optimized performance through enterprise-grade hardware and continuous maintenance.
• Provide proactive monitoring and 24/7 customer support to keep sites secure, updated, and responsive.

Grow Without Stress This Holiday Shopping Season

Online retail is one of the most dynamic and competitive industries, where technology now underpins every aspect of business success. During busy shopping seasons, when traffic spikes and customer expectations soar, a resilient IT infrastructure is critical to ensuring stability, security and growth. Rising security incidents and intensifying competition have made fast, reliable and always-on shopping experiences just as important as product and price. By investing in scalable systems and partnering with a reliable MSP that prioritizes customer support and understands their business needs, retailers can anticipate demand, withstand disruption, and turn their infrastructure into a true driver of customer loyalty and competitive advantage.

Charlotte Webb is the marketing and operations director at Hyve Managed Hosting, a fully managed global hosting provider.