30 billion dollars in 24 hours. That is the result of this year’s Single’s Day. In 2017, even foreign marketplaces had a daily increase of 6% to 9% on this day. But what if your website were to suddenly crash down due to this traffic peak? We talked about compliance challenges last time, but China eCommerce website hosting solutions also help tackle these issues.
In this day and age, website speed and reliability are crucial for companies. Every second it takes for your page to respond, decreases your conversion rate with 7%. 3 seconds of page loading could make 40% of the users leave your website. Reportedly, Amazon faced a loss of 3.75 million USD due to an outage of only 20 minutes. And for every 100 milliseconds that Amazon increases its website speed, revenue goes up by 1%.
So today we delve a bit further into China eCommerce website hosting, specifically cloud hosting. What are current developments on the Chinese market? How can cloud hosting services benefit your eCommerce website? We discuss the details!
China Cloud Technology Developments
It will come as no surprise that the Chinese cloud technology market is huge. Forbes reported earlier this year that cloud infrastructure and software in the world’s second-largest economy is expected to quadruple by 2021 to 9,8 billion USD from 2,4 billion USD last year.
Chinese internet service providers are now entering the global stage. Large companies such as Alibaba Cloud (Aliyun), Baidu Cloud and Tencent Cloud now provide a global cloud infrastructure. However, features are a bit more limited in scope abroad, mainly focusing on elastic computing (being able to quickly expand or decrease computer processing, memory, and storage resources to meet changing demands) and storage.
On the other hand, international parties such as Amazon’s AWS China also have limitations on their services in China. As we mentioned in our
previous article, data storage and protection restrict operations in Mainland China. For example, customers who wish to use the AWS China Regions need to sign up for a separate set of account credentials unique to AWS China services.
The Risks and Solutions
So you want your Chinese customers to have a great experience with a stable, accessible, quick and safe website. Let’s see how your China eCommerce website hosting solution can be the answer to some of your questions.
How Can I Ensure My Website’s Speed And Reliability?
eCommerce stores regularly experience spikes in traffic. A peak season like the holiday period is a prime example. Ad impressions often increase by 50%, CTR rise by 100%, direct traffic increases by 150%, the average order value grows by 30%, and the conversion rates goes up 60%.
How can the right cloud hosting solution ensure your website can handle this? One of the great advantages is that you can easily configure demand for traffic peaks. Not only can you avoid sales loss due to server downtime or slow operation, it will also bring down costs. If you plan ahead and configure accordingly, you will only need to pay extra during the high traffic period.
Additionally, a professional third party will regularly monitor your website performance, perform periodic backups and keep an eye on available backup space.
As for speed, using a Mainland China cloud hosting provider will already speed up the connection. A service like caching of static content can also make page loads up to 5 times quicker through.
Something else that helps optimize page loading speed in different continents and regions is a Content Distribution Network (CDN) service. A CDN can distribute your heavy media and downloadable content in different regions to be accessible by a customer in a specific region.
Are Cloud Hosting Solutions Safe And Secure?
eCommerce websites have a lot of sensitive data from transactions, customer accounts, product details etc. Especially with usage of the cloud becoming popular in recent years, it has been reported that 90% of cybersecurity professionals are concerned about cloud security. Data loss and leakage (67%), data privacy (61%) and confidentiality breaches (53%) are at the top of the list.
Not only do companies manage private and sensitive data, it also needs to be stored and backed up. This includes a.o. consumer details, purchase history, order status, as well as digital info such as customer labels and purchase preferences.
Because many activities take place online nowadays, cloud security, especially for financial services, is very high. Professional and experienced China eCommerce website hosting providers have strict control of data confidentiality, protect against DDOS attacks break-in attempts and fraud. Another service they provide is log file analysis for system and software, which will also help with resolving hardware or software anomalies, resource consumption issues and unexpected peaks
Moreover, since each server hosted by the cloud only performs a specific set of tasks. When any server failure occurs, another server (or multiple servers) can temporarily serve as a backup. Therefore, even during a major event such as a natural disaster, the company's data is always backed up safely.
Lastly, cloud hosting uses advanced mechanisms such as automatic restart, collecting diagnostic information, and notifying technicians of problems with failures. This eases data recovery and minimizes the waiting time to access information.
Are Cloud Hosting Solutions Legally Compliant?
We already discussed legal issues in cross-border eCommerce in our previous article. Suffice to say that choosing a trustworthy Mainland China cloud hosting service provider will ensure you comply with China’s newest laws and regulations.
Do You Need An Extensive IT Team To Manage A Cloud Hosting Solution?
The good thing about cloud hosting solutions is that you can implement them with limited resources! Using a third party for your hosting solution will allow your lean IT team to focus on other important tasks and issues.
Furthermore, you can use the cloud service provider’s resources to reduce upfront costs and investments in hardware equipment. If your business grows quickly and has heavily varying traffic, it will be very difficult to scale accordingly with your own physical servers. With a cloud hosting solution, businesses can scale their traffic to meet changing needs.
Are There eCommerce-specific Cloud Hosting Solutions?
The biggest difference between regular and eCommerce websites is the data involved. Orders, transactions, returns, shipments etc., a China eCommerce website hosting solution should guarantee all data processing and store operations go smoothly.
If you set up a store on Tmall, you may think that it is natural the server processes this without any problems. However, it is something to carefully consider when setting up your own eCommerce brand website.
Say, for example, you have a Adobe Commerce (before 2021 it was known as Magento) eCommerce website. Then you need to make sure your hosting solution fits the platform. At TMO Group, we have extensive experience in China-optimized Magento hosting solutions, especially dealing with high concurrency during peak promotion periods and solving high latency caused by complex ISP interconnections.
To ensure the best shopping experience, we also have an eCommerce ‘layer’ that is specifically suited to optimizing eCommerce containers. By controlling the integration of software development and hosting setup, we ensure that our managed services deliver smooth and seamless interactions with your customers.
China eCommerce Website Hosting Solutions
At TMO Group, we specialize in eCommerce hosting, especially for websites based on Adobe Commerce (Magento). Our cloud server is configured for Magento optimization, to boost your eCommerce success and growth. With our decades of China eCommerce and cloud hosting experience, we offer fast, reliable and secure Magento hosting solutions in China and globally.
By controlling the process of software development and hosting architecture, we guarantee a smooth and seamless user experience for your target group. We provide you with a scalable single-region or multi-region solution through our cloud hosting network and private cloud hosting. Furthermore, we offer extensive Service Level Agreements on business support and development support services.
Additionally, we offer more generalized eCommerce solutions to help brands succeed in China's competitive eCommerce environment. Get in touch if you want a strategy devised to suit your business's particulars.
