How to choose hosting for e-commerce?

Hosting is about reconciling certain business risk with the scale and stability of the business. The bigger our sales, the more stability we expect. With a high level of stability comes a higher hosting cost. In addition to the average traffic volume on our store we should also factor in extra nuances that let us better fit hosting to our business:

Is traffic steady or are there cyclical but sporadic spikes? Steady traffic enables better planning and maintaining dedicated servers. Sporadic spikes suggest a cloud, highly scalable environment may be cheaper.

Do we have specialist administrators on hand to manage the environments?

Do we need extra developer tools that e.g. AWS (Amazon Web Services) offers as part of its base hosting services?

Are we optimizing the store for stability or for speed of recovery after a failure? If we go for stability we have to invest in new high-performance servers; if we go for speed of recovery we can pick much cheaper hardware that can be swapped during an outage.

If you want to read more on how to ensure the stability of an online store, especially during Black Friday or pre-holiday shopping, do read the article on our blog.