Hardware resources, monitoring, updating and backup: what elements to consider to offer a performing and secure structure to your online store?
Starting on the right foot: Business Plan
Just like a physical store, even for a virtual store it is necessary to ask yourself some preliminary questions that will help you to better define and define your project. For example, you can ask yourself:
- What will be the turnout of e-commerce? Is ecommerce new or does it already have a customer base? Is the brand new and will it have to make its way into the market or is it known?
- How much warehouse (storage) will I need to have?
- What relationship will I have with my clients? If I’m closed (I’m offline) will they come back tomorrow or will they go to the competitor?
- How much am I willing to invest initially? Do I open the shop in 50 square meters or 400 square meters? Changing the structure of an e-commerce will always bring work to do and a minimum of disservice for customers so it is essential to have a long-term vision.
Hardware resources: shared or dedicated?
A question that many ask themselves concerns the use of shared resources, such as our linux Enterprise hosting plan perfect for e-commerce, or dedicated ones like our Cloud Servers . To better define the resources you will have to think about how many simultaneous visits the server will have to manage and how much memory an e-commerce visit needs.
Shared resources: pros and cons
Pros of shared resources:
- Less expense
- More resources available in the event of peaks, to be able to better manage them
Cons of shared resources:
- Limited possibilities in choosing server configurations
- Risk of being moved to another infrastructure by changing the IP address
- Risk of a slowed down service due to damage caused by neighbors or services in the same shared resources
Dedicated resources: pros and cons
Pros of dedicated resources:
- Of course, resources dedicated to your exclusive use
- Statically assigned IP
- Full server customization, daemons and configurations
- Possibility to independently choose the backup and security policies that best suit your project, without having to submit to the obligations of the supplier as is the case with shared resources.
Cons of dedicated resources:
- Initial investment greater than shared resources
- Autonomous management of the operating system and daemons, with updates, tuning and monitoring
How to build a web server?
Servers and CMSs are dynamic realities, that is, they change even without “having touched anything”.
In the development phase you will ask yourself is it better to choose Apache or Nginx? MySQL or MariaDB? Our advice is to check the recommendations of the CMS.
Another question you will surely ask yourself: is it better to configure by hand or use automation panels? We recommend Plesk, a pre-configured and customizable automation panel that helps you manage everything in a simple and intuitive way.
Monitoring and updating
Increase in visits, CMS updates, campaigns and special operations: it is essential to monitor the situation and predict future needs thanks to monitoring systems such as Plesk Advanced Monitoring .
In fact, we advise you to provide automatic notifications via e-mail that warn you in the event of peaks and help you keep the situation under control.
In addition to monitoring, an important activity is updating: in fact, the operating system, the daemons and the CMS require continuous updates to offer excellent security, performance and functionality.
Our advice is to always take a snapshot before proceeding with updates .
Backup and Disaster Recovery
RPO (Recovery Point Objective) measures the maximum amount of data that the system can lose due to a sudden failure while RTO (Recovery Time Objective) is the time required for the complete recovery of the operation.
For example, if you go back online in 3 days, how much turnover do you lose? And what if it was Christmas time or black Friday? Here are our recommendations for an effective backup and disaster recovery strategy:
- Off-site database replication
- Frequent backups to different datacenters
- Structures replicated and balanced across multiple nodes and multiple datacenters
