It’s likely that, as an online retailer, you’ve encountered a difficult situation when trying to plan for varying web traffic.

In the end, it’s a gamble. You can either carefully allocate resources to save money or buy additional capacity to handle demand spikes that might never materialize, but the latter will cost you sales in the event of an unanticipated spike in traffic.

But it doesn’t have to be that way thanks to contemporary technology.

With the help of auto-scaling technology, HostForLIFE.eu enables e-commerce companies to instantly access infinite capacity and only pay for the resources they really use.

According to Robert, VP Marketing at HostForLIFE, “We want to make the cloud so easy for retailers to use that it’s like a utility.” “You can cut costs by up to 75% while guaranteeing you’ll always be covered in the event of a traffic surge because the infrastructure is right-sized.”

With the ability to predict traffic increases, HostForLIFE’s real-time and predictive auto-scaling can scale in advance of demand, ensuring 100% uptime. Today, over 3,000 retail locations employ this technology to maintain their websites up and running smoothly, even during periods of high traffic.

“We differentiate ourselves from most companies with conventional, server-based roots by having been born in the cloud,” he stated. These businesses typically use antiquated private clouds. Additionally, they use standard toolkits from public cloud providers in a piecemeal configuration that necessitates close supervision.

A Pioneer in Infrastructure and Cloud Computing

“Instead of scaling up by adding more servers, the paper explored how the cloud could be used with predictive algorithms to scale out network infrastructure,” according to Robert. “The objective was to provide e-commerce companies with appropriately sized infrastructure during unexpected surges in traffic and to do so consistently, anticipating demand so retailers never hit those walls that cause a site to slow down or crash.”

Robert started turning his paper into a product in 2012, right around the time cloud computing was starting to gain traction in mainstream markets. Due to the success of the final prototype, Robert started concentrating on raising money for a company. Following the receipt of seed funding, the company was formally founded in 2013.

Robert stated, “We are a technology company at our core. We are also a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider with an e-commerce-specific technology stack. We’ve added end-to-end security, wrapped everything in automation, and spent years concentrating on predictive scaling.”

The business currently has offices in London and Amsterdam. The team is still committed to achieving its original goals, which include becoming the go-to business for e-commerce cloud solutions and offering a single platform with 100% uptime, limitless scalability, excellent performance, and superior security and control.

An Unusual Method for Offering Customer Service

With HostForLIFE’s extensive feature set enabling high uptime rates, disaster recovery, and peak performance, Robert has no shortage of material to present HostForLIFE’s offerings from behind the tradeshow booth.

However, he informed us that the company’s outstanding customer service, rather than its cutting-edge technology, is what he loves most about HostForLIFE to share with others.

“We take great pride in upholding our core value of delivering results regardless of the circumstances,” Robert stated. “Ecommerce companies frequently cite support as the reason they switched providers—they’ve experienced some serious pain, whether it’s a security breach or an outage at the worst possible time.”

Customers of many hosting companies are forced to use tier-based support systems, which is a tactic that frequently results in longer resolution times, irate clients, and lower customer satisfaction ratings. Webscale adopts a very different strategy.

According to Robert, “We turned conventional support on its head.” “As a mid-market retailer, 30 minutes of downtime can cost you thousands of dollars, and if you’re an enterprise-grade ecommerce provider, it can cost you millions of dollars in the ecommerce space.”

Every support ticket at HostForLIFE is routed directly to the top tier. Robert stated, “If it’s an urgent fix, they’ll get it done right away.” They will move it to level two if it is a less urgent matter that will take more time. We always give you access to the best people first, and we back it all up with a critical SLA of 15 minutes. In actuality, our team resolves the majority of problems in under ten minutes.

A streamlined support process is another benefit of automation. According to Robert, HostForLIFE handles the majority of issue responses automatically before involving a human.

He claimed that “our product is almost a level zero support agent in itself.” “It has the ability to make informed decisions about events occurring within the infrastructure and implement the necessary adjustments to avoid any problems affecting the security, uptime, or performance.”

Enhancing Automation and Security

Regarding the future, the HostForLIFE team intends to intensify its attention to security. In 2024, the company enhanced its product with features like content security policies, intrusion detection, anomaly detection, and multifactor authentication, and it intends to maintain this momentum.

According to Robert, “we’re already, I think, the safest e-commerce hosting provider out there, and we plan to take that even further in 2024.” “We’ll keep concentrating on the HostForLIFE Cloud Security Suite going forward because it is extremely secure.”

Additionally, HostForLIFE will advance its automation technology to support clients in processing and comprehending traffic data even more.

“We had to first figure out how to convert legacy e-commerce applications to run in the cloud,” stated Robert. “It entailed transitioning to the realm of DevOps and decentralized cloud proxies.”

After that, according to Robert, HostForLIFE concentrated on automation and monitoring, and it will still do so in the future.

“With more than 5,000 clients, we are able to process billions of requests daily and search through trillions of requests annually to extract valuable data. Because of our understanding of our customers’ infrastructure, we were able to block 300 million cyber threats over the course of Black Friday weekend alone,” he said. Therefore, in the upcoming year, we will keep putting a lot of effort into enhancing our visibility and security stack and will keep automating wherever we can. Our ultimate goal is to provide our customers with flawless shopping experiences and peace of mind.

What is Cloud Hosting?

Cloud hosting encompasses the storage of your data across various servers. This makes it accessible from anywhere, providing that you have a device and an internet connection. Your cloud hosting services are often taken care of by vendors. Vendors store your data in multiple data centers around the world. 

Cloud hosting is often compared and contrasted to traditional hosting. Traditional hosting includes dedicated and shared hosting. Organizations are increasingly looking for alternatives to traditional solutions. While there are certainly respective benefits to each hosting solution, we will be sharing why you should opt for cloud hosting.  

6 Advantages Using Cloud Hosting

1. Scalability & Flexibility

A significant advantage to cloud hosting is the scalability of it. This is especially beneficial for smaller organizations or companies that experience quick growth, like start ups. You can easily add or reduce various resources such as storage and bandwidth, according to the news of your organization. On the other hand, you would be unable to do the same with traditional hosting at the same ease and speed. 

In addition, your organization is not bound to any servers that you otherwise would be due to traditional hosting. This is because with traditional hosting, you might be finding yourself opting for physically closer locations to maximize load times. On the contrary, cloud hosting servers are accessible with a device and an internet connection from anywhere. 

2. Cost Efficiency

With cloud hosting, you do not have to worry about capital expenditure on infrastructure – providers handle that for you. Additionally, you only need to pay for the services and resources that you are actually using. In a traditional hosting model, however, you need to invest in infrastructure and also pay a fixed amount for services and resources regardless of whether you use them.

3. Backup and Disaster Recovery

The cloud hosting multi-server setup allows for data to be automatically backed up. This provides for a fast and easy disaster recovery feature.

In the single-server setup of traditional hosting, disaster recovery is not feasible as there is only one server that hosts your data and applications. For disaster recovery, you need to make special arrangements for backup.

4. Ease of Mind

With the cloud, you generally work with a vendor or a server host. Vendors offer customer support and service to help ensure that your organization is equipped to focus on your operations. You have a trained and specialized team to help in case you are facing any technical issues. 

Especially for smaller organizations who may not have a dedicated IT team, this can be a beneficial alternative. Some vendors may even provide 24/7 support to ensure that you have your needs met around the clock. 

In addition, your vendors provide secure cloud solutions. This can reduce data security risks for your organization. Your vendor should be able to tell you about how your data is being kept secure. This can be in terms of their various policies or procedures in place to ensure  security. 

5. Latest Technology

Cloud hosting takes advantage of the latest technologies. You can automatically integrate and customise your software applications based on your business’ needs and preferences. This includes software versions, server upgrades and processing power.

Traditional hosting does not allow you to automatically customise or upgrade.

6. Traffic & Uptime

With many connected and dedicated servers, you will have less downtime. In the case that a server fails, another one can simply take over. However, this is not the case with traditional hosting, which relies on a single server instead of multiple servers. 

Once one server goes down, it can result in lengthier downtimes.  With less downtime for your organization’s applications and website, it can result in higher productivity for your team.