You have always been a leader, not a follower, so you decided to ditch the traditional path that leads down to a run-of-the-mill 9-5 job and opted for entrepreneurship. Inspired by the roaring success of Amazon, eBay, and Alibaba, you decided to open your own E-commerce store, complemented by a custom-built E-commerce website a few months down the road. Now is the time to weigh your options and choose a viable hosting provider.

Instead of cutting corners, you opted for the best hosting provider you could come across but ended up choosing the traditional hosting option instead of a cloud-based E-commerce hosting. Instead of experiencing an instant feeling of joy and relief that you were hoping for, you instead find yourself contending with a higher bounce rate, a poor user experience, dwindling sales, and a mammoth pecuniary loss. To give you a better idea about how small delays in page load times can impact your bottom line, you will be surprised to learn that for an eCommerce store making $100,000 a day, one-second delay can lead to an annual sales loss exceeding $2.5 million.

If you are still not sold on hosting your E-commerce store on the cloud, here are seven convincing reasons to change your mind.

1. Cost

One of the major reasons why businesses are opting for cloud hosting is because it is easier on the pockets. For one, you don’t have to purchase expensive hardware or even software licenses. With increasing competition and a heated price war raging on in the cloud hosting space, you can get the best value for your money. Compare prices and you can easily find the best deal when it comes to the price and enjoys significant cost savings as compared to other hosting options. With the cloud provider taking care of everything, you can breathe a little easier.

2. Reliability

As mentioned above, opting for cloud-based hosting alleviates you from the hassle of buying hardware and software. What this means is that you don’t have to worry about hardware-related issues such as hard drive failure, database issues, memory problems, processing troubles, power surges and software issues, such as corrupt or buggy software.

With all these issues out of the equation, you can reap the benefits of reliability and stability. Many cloud-based service providers offer regular backup facility, and some even offer advanced backup options such as physical disc copies and file syncing features. In short, your data is accessible and safe simultaneously when you opt for a cloud-based hosting provider.

3. Scalability

The pace at which E-commerce industry is evolving makes it indispensable to invest in a static solution. You need a system that grows in tandem with your business. You need to respond to change quickly to make the most of new opportunities. Cloud-based hosting offers you that liberty. You can easily upscale and downscale as per your business needs. For instance, with the holiday season looming ahead, you can upscale your resources to accommodate higher demand, seasonal surges and a heightened traffic. This provides you the flexibility that your business needs to get ahead of your competitors. Moreover, it makes your E-commerce business future-proof.

4. Security

Security has always been a pain in the neck for business owners, even more so for E-commerce businesses. The volume of financial transactions conducted through e-commerce stores attracts the attention of hackers and renders E-commerce store a lucrative target. With modern cloud-hosting providers implementing stringent security measures to keep your data safe, you can breathe a little easier. Everything running the gamut from encryption, biometric screening, and integrating security measures at the application and network layers, to third-party vulnerability testing, helps them keep your data away from prying eyes. Choose a hosting provider that values your data and is willing to go to painstaking lengths to keep it private and safe.

5. Performance

According to a study conducted by Akamai, 40% of users will abandon your webpage if it fails to load within three seconds. This portrays how deeply speed and performance matters to your users. A sudden gush of traffic can bring your website speed down to a crawl if you are using a traditional hosting method, but thankfully, it’s a whole new story when we talk about cloud-based hosting. Cloud hosting offers you more bandwidth, storage space and computational resources. This means that it is much better at handling load and delivering an enhanced user experience for your consumers.

6. Tracking

If you want to succeed at any business, you will have to put your customer first. Same goes for E-commerce as well. The only difference is that E-commerce business is preceded by more intricate requirements. Cloud-based hosting lets you handle everything without breaking a sweat. The more insights you have about your customers, the better you can target them. With built-in analytics, you can keep an eye on every move and know which products your buyers are buying and which ones they are shunning.

Related Read: IaaS vs PaaS vs SaaS: Knowing What to Choose for Your Next Digital Business? 

7. Maintenance

As mentioned above, the vendor will take care of everything from hardware to software. Finding ready-made solutions saves you from the trouble of reinventing features. Cloud-based hosting saves you and your IT department from a lot of hassle and helps them focus on value-driven activities. Your IT department can spend most of their time in implementing policies and developing strategies to manage IT affairs efficiently, while the vendors take care of all your hardware and software. What’s more, you don’t have to worry about updates or any compatibility issues, which gives you the peace of mind that businesses can only dream of.

Conclusion

After reading this article, you might be convinced that cloud-based hosting is the right choice for your E-commerce store. Save money on hardware and software, reap the benefits of improved reliability, scalability and performance and security with cloud-based hosting and see your sales graph move in upward direction. Keep an eye on user behavior and preferences with powerful analytics and reduce the burden of your IT department by letting vendors handle it.

Which is the most compelling reason that is forcing you to host your E-commerce store on the cloud? Feel free to share it with us in the comments section below.