The challenge
For many eCommerce businesses, customer demand is unpredictable. Seasonal events such as Black Friday, flash sales and product launches can generate sudden traffic spikes that place significant pressure on hosting infrastructure. If platforms cannot scale quickly enough, businesses risk slow page loads, virtual queues, failed checkouts and lost revenue.
Our approach
Our consultants’ first priority when working with eCommerce businesses is understanding your traffic patterns. By analysing when your site experiences different volumes of traffic, identifying expected seasonal peaks and reviewing any periods of downtime, we build a clear picture of your resource requirements and the level of scalability your platform needs.
Following a review of your existing infrastructure, our engineers design a bespoke private cloud platform tailored to your business. Private cloud provides dedicated resources, ensuring consistent performance during busy trading periods while giving eCommerce businesses greater control over security, compliance and infrastructure configuration.
To support the changing demands of eCommerce websites, dynamic scalability is essential. We work closely with you to plan the additional resources required during high-traffic periods, configuring your platform to automatically scale resources up as visitor numbers increase, and back down again as demand falls. We can also configure alert thresholds, allowing our engineers to proactively allocate resources while giving you full visibility of your platform.
This dynamic scalability enables your platform to handle sudden traffic spikes without affecting performance or customer experience, while ensuring you only pay for the resources you need during quieter periods.
Before your platform goes live, our engineers carry out comprehensive stress testing to validate performance under load and ensure it is ready to handle peak demand.
Our private cloud platform is fully managed, with 24/7/365 monitoring and support from our engineering team. Through proactive monitoring, we identify and resolve potential issues before they impact your site, continuously optimize resource usage, and maximize platform uptime.
The outcome
For eCommerce businesses, even short periods of poor performance or downtime can have a direct impact on revenue and customer experience. A managed private cloud platform provides the dedicated resources, resilience and scalability needed to maintain consistent performance during both day-to-day operations and peak trading periods.
With dynamic scalability, your platform can automatically respond to changing demand, ensuring resources are available when traffic increases and scale back down when demand returns to normal. This helps you deliver a fast, reliable shopping experience while avoiding unnecessary infrastructure costs during quieter periods.
Our private cloud platform is fully managed by our team of cloud experts, with 24/7/365 monitoring, optimization and support. By proactively identifying and resolving issues before they affect your platform, we help maximize uptime, improve performance and give your team confidence that your infrastructure is ready to support your business as it grows.
When should an eCommerce business consider private cloud?
As your business grows, your hosting requirements become more complex. If your current infrastructure is limiting performance, scalability or resilience, it may be time to consider a managed private cloud platform.
Common signs include:
- Your website experiences slow performance or downtime during busy trading periods.
- Your current hosting platform cannot scale quickly enough to meet spikes in customer demand.
- Increasing capacity is expensive or comes with unpredictable costs.
- Customers experience slow page loads, long wait times or abandon their baskets during peak traffic.
- You need greater control over security, compliance or infrastructure configuration.
- Your internal team is spending too much time managing infrastructure instead of focusing on business growth.
Customer case study
This approach was used when supporting Remarkable Commerce, an eCommerce platform provider whose retail customers experience significant traffic spikes during Black Friday and other peak trading periods.
Before partnering with Hyve, Remarkable had to provision additional dedicated servers each year to cope with increased demand. This was both costly and time-consuming, making it difficult to scale quickly when traffic surged. If downtime occurred, their team also faced long delays accessing technical support, impacting both platform performance and the experience of their customers.
Hyve designed a bespoke private cloud platform tailored to Remarkable’s requirements, virtualizing its infrastructure to enable dynamic scalability. Resources automatically scale up before and during periods of high demand, before scaling back down once traffic returns to normal. We also work closely with Remarkable to carry out regular stress testing ahead of Black Friday, while our engineers proactively monitor the platform 24/7/365 to identify and resolve potential issues before they affect performance.
The results have enabled Remarkable to confidently support its customers through some of the busiest retail periods of the year. Despite a 43% increase in Black Friday users compared to the previous year, the platform successfully handled demand without virtual queues, resulting in an 89% increase in successful transactions compared with the three weeks before the event.