There are countless considerations when launching a new online retail site, transitioning to a new eCommerce platform, or giving your current site a facelift.

Aesthetics, branding, navigation and marketing are all top considerations that most companies spend a long time deliberating on – but what about the bare bones of your site?

There are several options to choose from when hosting your Magento site and all of them can impact the customer experience.

Whether you choose to host with a technology partner, receive assistance with the install on-premise, or choose Magento hosting and their cloud offering… Here are the critical reasons why web server performance is an important consideration for your online store.

The health of your server is imperative to getting customers into the very top of your sales funnel; web servers that are not optimized for your eCommerce site could be causing revenue loss. Determining the best hosting solution for your needs can be a game changer.

There are several critical areas to look at when choosing a server to host your store: 

Assess Server Scalability

Ensuring that your server can handle peak load times that are unusual to the day-to-day traffic flow into your site is imperative for meeting industry best practices on site load time and site down time.

The holiday eCommerce season starts earlier and earlier each year, with the “official” start of the season dubbed Grey November, starting on November first. Heavy site traffic for over two months is an amazing revenue-driver – if your server can keep up with demand.

Within the competitive holiday eCommerce market, any down time or lags can instantly lose your business a customer. National Retail Federation reports that 36% of Americans planned to do holiday shopping online in 2014. A website that cannot handle increased load times and scale up to peak performance is a revenue-killer.

What To Know About Server Types

There will be several options available to you when choosing a server plan.

Do you have a large enough catalog and traffic flow to justify the investment in your own private server? If not, a clustered server that is shared with other tenants is a lower-cost way to host.

This may make some clients wary, but the edge security features in a reliable server partner will ensure that all data is kept private and the servers do not overlap or slow the performance of any other tenants, regardless of peak traffic and load.

On-premises servers are an option that retailers choose for increased security and the ability to manage all aspects of the server in-house.

Choosing an on-premises server requires professionals on-hand, or working with a company that provides managed services to support the server. The upside of a dedicated server is a private host and a front-end investment – with a lot less continuous payment needed down the road.

A good hosting company will usually write in a guaranteed maximum downtime in the service-level agreement, ensuring that any excessive downtime is handled immediately and your company gets reimbursed a percentage of the monthly hosting fees for interruptions in excess of the maximum downtime guarantee.

Prioritize Reliability

With the average online shopper’s attention span waning, load time is crucial to ensuring customers to enter your sales funnel. If site speed is slow, you could be cutting into your revenue by 40%, according to research by Kissmetrics.

Pouring money into marketing and branding is a moot point if customers bounce off your site before it loads.

Nexcess, a hosting company designed to perform for Magento sites, has an average load time of 2.04 seconds on a Magento Enterprise edition site – load time could be even less depending on catalog size.

Simplify Hosting with a Partner

There’s a lot to know when running an ecommerce website, so it’s completely natural to rely on relationships and strategic partnerships to help you find assess and choose between outstanding hosting services.

Web Solutions NYC and Nexcess have formed a partnership to help companies running on other server solutions migrate to Nexcess.

Web Solutions NYC will have your new server up and running with a faster time-to-market. Our extensive experience migrating Magento clients to Nexcess servers means a shorter project timeline and seamless transition.