Everybody likes to save money, but if you are running ecommerce as part of your business then saving it in the wrong places can have major consequences. So if you are selling products or services on your website, then you should really invest in a dedicated server as soon as you reasonably can.
Shared resources are great; they save money and they lower the price of entry. But at peak times you can find they are stretched, which means your site could take slightly longer to load. We’ve all seen that, even with major sites. It is not a good look.
Load times are one of the key reasons for losing a sale. Indeed, Kissmetrics recently reported that 40% of customers will simply abandon their cart if a page takes more than three seconds to load. So if you’re selling high-ticket items or you’re doing major volume, then you need to factor that into your equations and consider the benefits of upgrading.
Let’s put it in physical terms. If you had a shop and you closed at random times of the day, even for a few minutes, you would lose business. If you had a long queue of customers and simply couldn’t serve them in time, some would leave. It’s the same in the online world. Right now the average company suffers with 27 hours of downtime each and every year, according to a recent study, which can add up to a significant cost.
Shared resource servers often resort to throttling access speeds, so if you write the cleverest blog post in the world and it goes viral, you might not feel the benefit of that as your server is simply overloaded. That would be a shame as you might never know your true potential.
A dedicated server also offers you a greater degree of control, when it comes to bespoke software and other items you might want to include with your website. Even your apps and plugins can work much more smoothly with dedicated space.
Dedicated server packages are cheaper than they used to be, too, and they are infinitely scalable, within reason.
So if you are selling online and want to be the best you can be, look at a dedicated server and get ready to feel the difference.
