Did you know that your Ecommerce site’s hosting package has limits? You are more than likely to know about any limits on the Size of the site or the bandwidth it is allocated, but did you know that there could well be a limit on the amount of server CPU time it can use? NO?, then you’d better check quickly and find out just how close your site has been getting recently because if you hit the limit, the chances are your site will shut down until the demand on the CPU reduces.
Your Site Could Stop Working
I have seen this happen to one of my customers, the site simply disappearing off the screen, so to speak. My initial SEO audit had picked up that something was wrong, the site being slow, and some links timing out (not a good sign). Investigations by the web developer (I am not a designer or developer, just dealing with SEO) – so this had to be done by them, were still in progress when this happened. Whilst it is bad news that the site went down, it is a cloud with a silver lining, as it points us to what could be the underlying issue, the one that has bedevilled the site since November 2020 (I only got involved last week).
Check Your Sites Server CPU Usage
There is a lesson here for all E-Commerce site owners, check your site for speed and ask for details of your sites server CPU usage. Even if it is not getting close to the limit, if it is high when the traffic is low, then something is amiss, and you don’t want it going wrong when the Christmas rush is in full swing do you? As one of the web developers we work with says:- “An e-commerce website being transactional in nature uses up more server resources than someone simply browsing. It’s important that online sellers look at both the level of transactions they do in an average period, but also their ability to handle spikes in traffic. Nothing worse than having a sudden rush of customers and not being able to sell to any of them! It’s not only the missed sales but a poor user experience that customers might not return to.” The dilemma often comes when choosing hosting in the first place, as site owners might not want to pay for a high-powered server at a time when orders are normal. This is why they provide a scalable hosting solution for e-commerce websites. This means that more power can be added to a website within minutes and without any downtime, this then being reduced when it’s not needed. Site owners only pay for what they use. This avoids getting into the situations where a site could go down and someone having to take time and effort to re-platform the site during a traffic spike, which could well be over by the time you’re finished anyway.	