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HOSTING GUIDE
Hosting for an online shop: plan for peaks, orders and recovery
An online shop needs more than space for a product catalog. At a critical moment, the cart, order, payment and customer message must all work. Assess the entire purchase journey when choosing hosting, not just home page speed.
Check the requirements of your shop system and its extensions: runtime version, database, scheduled jobs and connections to payment and shipping services. Find out where outgoing mail runs and how you learn when an order message is not delivered. Without a view of the whole flow, an outage in an external service can look like a hosting fault.
Remember that data changes all day
Purchases, stock levels and customer accounts change continuously. An infrequent backup can mean losing important data. Ask how often copies are made, how long they are kept and how recovery works. Test restoration in a separate environment; restoring an old database into a live shop could overwrite newer orders.
Test a realistic peak
Before a promotion or campaign, estimate concurrent visitors and the critical purchase steps. Check what happens if CPU, memory or database limits are exceeded and how quickly capacity can be increased. Run a load test within the provider's terms and without live payments. Watch whether orders complete, not only how fast the catalog responds.
When planning a campaign, ask who will be available at launch. The shop administrator, hosting provider and payment gateway operator may each handle a different part of the same problem. Keep their contacts and a short procedure ready for a case where a payment succeeds but the order is not saved. That fault is more painful for a customer than a slow product image.
Practical question: Who will handle an incident on Saturday evening, and how will they notice that orders have stopped being saved? Include the answer when choosing hosting.