Prepare a capacity brief before choosing or upgrading hosting for an online store. Product count and monthly visits alone do not describe how much work the application performs during searches, checkout, imports or promotional peaks.
01 Describe the store's workload
- Record the ecommerce platform, supported runtime requirements, database and major extensions. Identify external payment, search, inventory and delivery integrations.
- Measure the current store's busy periods where data exists. Include concurrent activity, uncached requests, checkout traffic, scheduled jobs and administrative imports.
- Record storage use and growth for products, media, database, logs and backups. Separate live data from copies that could be stored elsewhere appropriately.
- List campaigns or events expected to change demand. State the expected increase as an estimate and identify the evidence behind it.
- Define operational requirements: recovery objectives, monitoring, maintenance responsibility and the effect of a failed checkout or delayed order notification.
- Send us the brief and request a plan assessment. Ask which resource limits, management tasks and scaling changes apply to the proposed service.
- Before launch or a major promotion, run authorised representative tests in a suitable environment and monitor actual bottlenecks. Agree a response plan for demand beyond the tested range.
Common questions
Will a larger server fix every slow store?
No. Inefficient queries, extensions, remote services and uncached work can remain limiting factors. Use measurements to identify the cause.
Does more disk space mean more checkout capacity?
Storage capacity and request-processing capacity are different. Review CPU, memory, database behaviour and application design as well as disk space.
Can I test against a real payment gateway?
Use the gateway's authorised test method and avoid creating unintended live charges. Coordinate any production test with the business and provider.