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Critical Hosted Infrastructure Facts

Every E-Commerce Vendor Must Know

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Accessibility

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Redundancy

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Security

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Transparency

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Agility

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Scalability

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Optimization

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Streamlining Transactions

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Disaster Recovery

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9 Critical Hosted Infrastructure Facts Every E-Commerce Vendor Must Know

When the traditional brick and mortar business first made inroads with the online community they carried on the tradition of offering a single monolithic method for interacting with the consumer. Those times are long behind us. Instead, the fabric of online e-commerce has changed into an expansive, elastic experience that extends well past the traditional boundaries of a single site. This poses a problem to businesses that are still operating under the assumption that e-commerce is only from a single site. The traditional e-commerce site must change to match the times. The foundation of todays e-commerce site, the infrastructure provider, must also change. To aid in creating a firm foundation for success, here are 9 critical facts about hosting every e-commerce vendor should know: Accessibility: 100% uptime is the 1. standard not the pinnacle According to a study by Emerson Network Power released during the Uptime Institute Symposium, downtime of one minute costs businesses $5,600 in lost revenue on average. If your provider has a 99.99% uptime guarantee, that translates to $294,336 lost every year. 1 When searching for an infrastructure provider, finding a 100% uptime guarantee is critical. RackHigh's 100% uptime guarantee is based on quality hardware and the development of a proprietary, automated platform. Automation speeds up reaction time from minutes to milliseconds. Automation handles problems seamlessly, rerouting traffic without your audience even knowing there was a problem. Creates high availability 2. Redundancy: and low latency Redundancy takes on two forms, solving network reliability and latency. Reliability deals with the ability to receive information and latency determines the speed at which this information is received. Although accessibility answers the question of reliability, latency is answered by speed of the network, locality to the customer, and the speed of the merchants site and applications. By working closely with a global infrastructure provider, you can lay the groundwork for a network that not only provides high availability, but also greatly decreases latency to your customers around the world.

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A 100% uptime guarantee is critical

Emerson Network Power, Understanding the Cost of Data Center Downtime

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Critical E-Commerce Considerations

Providers must offer a secure 3. Security: and compliant environment The infrastructure provider has a lasting impact on the security of the platform. The process starts by separating out the data layers. A quality provider will advise their clients to take the database and move it to its own server, away from direct public access. This can then be protected by using the providers private network to access the data between the web server and the database. Private networks offer a secured direct line of communication that is free of network discovery or unauthorized access. Other network security measures include making access to the e-commerce sites backend available for only a handful of IPs or using direct SSL VPN access. Along with providing the proper systems configuration, a quality provider will add compliances to the mix. PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) compliance is a must for ecommerce merchants. Compliance is required if the merchant handles credit card numbers over any medium (such as over the phone, face-to-face transactions, or keeps any records with credit card numbers on them), regardless of whether or not they use a third party merchant account. Infrastructure providers for ecommerce merchants must offer PCI compliance that ensures the integrity of the network hardware. RackHigh ensures your environment is PCI-DSS compliant as well as going the extra mile to create a network configuration that natively includes best security practices. Building trust via verifiable 4. Transparency: and enforceable operational transparency Just as trust is a factor between merchants and their customers, so too is there trust between a merchant and their provider. Trust is primarily formed by interaction between the staff of the merchant and that of the infrastructure provider. The honesty of that trust is then enforced via policy such as the providers service level agreement (SLA). Each infrastructure provider approaches transparency from different angles. As an example, RackHigh ensures each customer interacts with a single point of contact. The representative grows with the customer and becomes intimately aware of their past problems as well as their business. Along with direct one-on-one contact, RackHigh also provides operational transparency in the form of an point-by-point SLA. Real-time monitoring is used to ensure that RackHigh lives up to the SLA and if RackHigh ever falls short, customers can hold RackHigh accountable with a simple click of the mouse. The ability to adapt to new 5. Agility: workloads, regardless of platform An infrastructure provider must provide the merchant the ability to adapt to ever changing workloads. Although it is customary to use cloud infrastructure for this purpose, a well-rounded infrastructure provider can also tune up dedicated servers to meet demands. RackHigh is able to rapidly deploy servers, in under an hour. If you require dedicated, bare-metal solutions instead of cloud resources, you have them at your

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Critical E-Commerce Considerations

disposal. Using the My.RackHigh control panel, you can also self-provision dedicated servers and virtual machines (VMs). Self-provisioning enables customers to avoid unnecessary wait times and back and forth emails with technicians. In other words, with RackHigh, your business infrastructure is deployed on your schedule when you want it, not when it is most convenient to your provider. Infrastructure that matches 6. Scalability: your business needs Along with the ability to self-provision, RackHigh offers both public and private clouds to create seamless scalability to match even your must daunting workloads. Whether by themselves or in a hybrid configuration, you can create rules that govern your cloud instances so that they can automatically assess changing workloads and scale to match. Your infrastructure with RackHigh will be ready to support whatever your business demands. Optimization: A joint endeavor between provider and merchant Optimization is a process that occurs throughout the development of your e-commerc e platform. Whether it is based off of the efforts of the provider in maximizing throughput of your servers and network, or your own efforts in developing a platform that reduces the number of steps your customers go through to purchase, optimization MUST bet the watchword you follow. RackHigh will tune your servers and network hardware to ensure you get maximum performance. Our sales architects will also show you what configurations work best for each data layer and how best to squeeze them for high efficiency. Transactions: Not just a 8. Streamlining merchant only process RackHigh's sales architects can show you how splitting up your configuration into multiple layers can decrease processing times and create happier customers. Using multiple data layers, can also decrease latency, increase security, and increase value by providing the right hardware where it is needed most. Recovery: Essential for business 9. Disaster continuity and customer loyalty Disaster recovery is no longer simply reacting to disaster but providing a means for continuity during and after disasters. Using a global network, RackHigh can help you create a business continuity plan in which your online presence continues to run and your data remains safe regardless of when and where disaster strikes.

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About RackHigh
RackHigh is a dedicated server and cloud hosting company that offers highly scalable, automated, on-demand infrastructure services to both end-users and resellers. With clients in . 120 countries, three geographically dispersed Saudi Arabian.-based data centers and a new facility in Karachi, PK; RackHigh provides dedicated, cloud, and managed services to more than 2,000 customers with 2,500+ servers online. RackHigh delivers state-of-the-art resources and services with industry-leading deployment time and custom support. RackHigh was established in 2009 in Saudi Arabia.

For more information, visit us at www.rackhigh.com

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