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The eCommerce sector offers some of the most exciting current business opportunities for businesses across a diverse range of industries. To make the most of these opportunities, however, it’s vital to choose the right ecommerce infrastructure. With that in mind, here’s a straightforward guide to both cloud eCommerce platforms and bare metal eCommerce platforms.
Cloud eCommerce platforms provide a straightforward route into ecommerce. They generally have little to no upfront costs and their consumption-based pricing system is usually very cost-effective when traffic volumes are low.
Easy to manage: Cloud solutions can generally be implemented and managed without the need for extensive in-house IT resources.
Global reach: Cloud eCommerce platforms can be deployed across multiple regions, enabling businesses to serve customers globally with reduced latency and improved user experiences.
High resilience: Cloud providers offer high availability and disaster recovery options, ensuring that the eCommerce platform remains operational even in the event of localized failures.
Cloud solutions provide access to a variety of instance types tailored to different performance needs. For instance, businesses can choose instances with higher CPU power for compute-intensive tasks or opt for memory-optimized instances for faster data processing.
Additionally, cloud services often include content delivery networks (CDNs) and managed databases that are optimized for speed, improving the overall performance of eCommerce platforms.
The performance of cloud solutions can, however, be impacted by multi-tenancy, where resources are shared among multiple users. This can introduce latency and variability in response times. This might be a concern for high-performance eCommerce platforms that require consistent and fast user experiences.
Cloud solutions typically comply with major security standards such as PCI-DSS, which is essential for processing online payments.
That said, security in the cloud operates on a shared responsibility model. While the cloud provider secures the infrastructure, the eCommerce business is responsible for securing the data, applications, and user access.
Misconfigurations, such as improperly set permissions on storage buckets, can lead to data breaches. This means it’s vital for businesses to implement strong security policies and regularly audit their cloud environments.
Cloud services enable automatic scaling based on traffic patterns, ensuring that the platform can handle sudden spikes in demand, such as during sales events or holiday seasons. Auto-scaling features adjust the number of instances or the amount of resources allocated to the platform, maintaining performance without manual intervention.
Bare metal eCommerce platforms require upfront financial investment and ongoing management from skilled IT staff. Their ongoing costs are, however, both relatively low and predictable. This makes them very economical for high workloads.
Advance customization: Bare metal platforms allow complete control over the hardware and software environment, enabling businesses to customize server configurations to meet specific needs.
High throughput and storage capacity: Bare metal servers often come with higher network throughput and storage options than cloud eCommerce platforms. This can significantly improve the speed of data processing, file transfers, and overall site performance, particularly for platforms handling large volumes of transactions or media-rich content.
Full control over where data is stored: Bare metal servers can be hosted in specific locations to meet local data residency requirements. This provides an additional layer of compliance (and legal) reassurance.
There are three main reasons why bare metal eCommerce platforms provide superior performance than cloud eCommerce platforms.
Firstly, their resources are dedicated to a single user. Secondly, that user gets the full value of the resources since there is no virtualization overhead. Thirdly, bare metal eCommerce platforms allow for in-depth customization. This enables businesses to optimize the server’s hardware and software specifically for their eCommerce platform.
For instance, businesses can select high-performance SSDs, custom networking solutions, or even GPUs. This high-performance hardware can significantly reduce the time needed to perform specialized tasks such as AI-driven recommendations or advanced data analytics.
The fact that bare metal servers are dedicated to a single user means that the risks associated with multi-tenancy are eliminated. This makes bare metal solutions particularly suitable for eCommerce platforms that handle highly sensitive data or have stringent compliance requirements.
Moreover, with bare metal, businesses have full control over the security measures implemented on the server. This includes the choice of firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and encryption methods.
Scalability can be a challenge with bare metal solutions. Unlike cloud environments, where resources can be scaled up or down automatically, scaling bare metal servers often requires manual intervention, such as provisioning new hardware or upgrading existing servers.
This process can be time-consuming and may lead to downtime, which can be detrimental to eCommerce platforms during high-traffic periods.
That said, bare metal solutions can be designed with scalability in mind by implementing techniques like load balancing and clustering. These strategies distribute traffic across multiple servers, ensuring that the eCommerce platform can handle increased demand.
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