Contrary to popular belief, selecting a reputable ecommerce hosting company is crucial if you own an online business. Too many companies fail as a result of slow loading times, inadequate security, and badly maintained web servers.
However, what qualities distinguish a superb e-commerce host? For the purpose of assisting you in your research and helping you make a more educated choice, we have compiled a list of the essential attributes you should never overlook in a hosting company.
All set to go? Now let’s get started!
What is Ecommerce Hosting?
A web host is a necessary component for any website and online business to go live. Your website can live on a server provided by hosting, which enables it to be connected to the internet and receive visitors.
In essence, you’re hiring a business that understands server security and optimization in exchange for the right to utilize someone else’s spare server space.
There are many distinct types and specialties of hosting. While some hosting types have specific plans with distinct features, others are called for the hardware around which they are built.
E-commerce hosting is just that.
A top-notch e-commerce hosting plan includes a number of unique features designed specifically for this kind of company. These might offer enhanced security, assistance setting up payment methods, free SSL encryption, and scaling during busy times.
Another option is WooCommerce hosting, which is essentially a subset of e-commerce hosting. With server configurations tailored to support the WooCommerce plugin, WooCommerce hosting offers all the benefits of e-commerce hosting plus more.
Types of Ecommerce Hosting
Your server’s hardware and configuration will depend on the many sorts of hosting that you must understand. Traditionally, dedicated, VPS, and shared hosting are the three primary varieties.
The lowest grade, shared hosting, is ideal for new businesses and those who just wish to go online. Although it is typically quite inexpensive, slower performance and having to share server space with other websites are the price for this. Ecommerce sites shouldn’t use this kind of hosting unless they are really broke.
The term “virtual private server” (VPS). Although your server is located on the same computer as other websites, many of the issues related to shared hosting are avoided because of its segregated resources. The highest grade, dedicated hosting, provides you with a private physical server. Naturally, this is not inexpensive. Although there is a superior option, both of these hosting kinds are suitable for e-commerce.
Cloud hosting is a well-liked remedy for e-commerce websites that frequently have server environment overgrowth. Hosting on the cloud is fully scalable. Resources can be added or removed at any moment. It’s also extremely reasonably priced for new businesses!
The cloud is almost definitely the infrastructure you want for expanding e-commerce companies.
The distinction between managed and unmanaged hosting adds another level to hosting types.
Although unmanaged hosting typically costs less, there is a significant drawback. All server setup, configuration, and ongoing security and maintenance are your responsibility. Essentially, all you’re buying is the right to an empty server.
Managed hosting takes care of everything. Updates, maintenance, security, setup, and configuration. With the assistance of a managed e-commerce host, you can ensure that your business remains operational.
To put it briefly, cloud hosting is perhaps the best option for an online store.
7 Aspects You Need to Look for in an Ecommerce Hosting Provider
Every e-commerce server ought to have a few characteristics. Look for these essential elements in an e-commerce host that you think would work well for your online business.
1. High Performance
A speedy and dependable host should be your first priority as an e-commerce site. If your website takes longer than three seconds to load, 57% of visitors will go away and 80% of them won’t come back. A great deal of potential was squandered there.
Shared hosting is a concern since it is unreliable and sluggish, which is undesirable for any online company. Additionally, you must exercise caution when selecting a host because some have unstable infrastructure that can lead to crashes or slowdowns.
It is essential to have a CDN, preferably part of your hosting package. A content delivery network (CDN) is a network of servers that are dispersed across a large region—globally, for well-known ones like Cloudflare. Everyone will experience substantially quicker load times when a user located far from your primary server attempts to access your website since they will be sent to a nearby CDN server.
Performance and uptime monitoring should also be a feature of your e-commerce provider, alerting you both instantly when something goes wrong. You must be ready to act quickly in the event that a server fails or that operations come to a halt.
2. Bandwidth and File Storage
In addition to requiring a large amount of file space, e-commerce websites typically receive the most traffic. In order to avoid having to pay large overage costs, you must find a host with adequate resources for you.
No matter what you’re creating, images are going to be a big element of the design and you’ll need a lot of them. Especially e-commerce websites have a tendency to use up storage quickly. Multiple high-resolution photographs will be required for each product you post, and as your business grows to a certain size, it might be understandable to question where all the storage space has disappeared to.
3. Scalable Hosting
An e-commerce store’s traffic might fluctuate greatly, in contrast to other kinds of websites, which expand gradually and reliably over time. Holidays frequently bring about a sharp increase in traffic, with clients appearing out of nowhere and growth typically occurring quickly and exponentially. You should search for scalable resources in a managed e-commerce host so that it may expand with your company.
Additionally, you should look for a host that won’t lock you in and that will allow you to add more CPU, RAM, and other resources whenever you need them. The greatest option for this is cloud hosting as you can easily add extra power or change your package whenever you’d like.
Upgrading with physical VPS or dedicated hosting necessitates switching servers or manually installing more powerful hardware, both of which can be expensive. On cloud hosting, upgrades are inexpensive.
4. Proactive Support
There will inevitably be problems and mistakes on your new website. Your website could not be accessible for hours if your host doesn’t have a responsive support staff. When there’s an issue, support should be able to work with you in a proactive manner and should be kind and helpful.
Every support staff should have a squad of skilled developers behind them. The development staff of the web host should be able to help you with even the most unforeseen problems if their servers and infrastructure are well-built and have little downtime.
Problems that arise on your site itself often won’t receive support, but those that arise on their end of the server will be resolved. Seek for round-the-clock assistance, as server problems can arise at any moment, even during the wee hours of the morning. You must take action to fix your website if you receive an alert telling you that it is down. It would be ideal if you could avoid losing any traffic at all and, even worse, wouldn’t have to get up at strange hours to update your website.
5. Full Security
Because e-commerce sites save sensitive information like credit card numbers, bank and Paypal passwords, and even the whole names and addresses of consumers, hackers frequently target them.
You should secure your website right away since it may be highly profitable to hack an online store with weak security, and new firms frequently lack the knowledge necessary to protect sensitive data.
It is up to you and your developers to secure your own code, yet many hacks occur as a result of your web host’s lax security. Malicious actors can quickly and easily access your website through server code flaws, capturing credentials as they are passed across the server or even inserting malware that targets visitors.
For this reason, you should pick a knowledgeable host. Take caution if they don’t have a hack-free policy. They could have extremely lax security, and they probably won’t take any action to repair the harm if you are hacked.
6. WooCommerce Integration
You most likely use WooCommerce if you’re just getting started with WordPress for your store. Not every web host is compatible with the plugin straight away. Even while there might not be any problems at first, your website might not perform as effectively as it might if sophisticated features like caching tailored to WooCommerce (and more) weren’t present.
WooCommerce hosting need to be included in the list of top e-commerce hosts, given the widespread use of WordPress.
PCI compliance is an often neglected feature that you should demand from your e-commerce hosting provider. The “payment card industry,” or PCI, is a group of security guidelines designed to prevent user information from being exposed as a result of shoddy website security. All websites that take credit card information have to be PCI compliant.
A host cannot ensure PCI compliance since securing your website requires a lot of work on your part. However, they might simplify the process for you by providing SSL certificates, putting a firewall on their servers, and utilizing robust server architecture.
7. Automatic Backups
We cannot overstate how crucial backups are for e-commerce websites. Data backups that happen automatically are essential. To safeguard your important database and store information, you need have a reliable backup system in place. It may run on a daily, monthly, or even hourly basis.
You run the risk of making a mistake that causes your site to crash or corrupts your database, especially if you’re dealing with WordPress where it’s simple to inadvertently update important settings.
You will waste a great deal of time and energy attempting to restore things to normal if you do not have a recent backup. You can even lose everything in the end. For this reason, you want a host that includes backups so you may operate your company worry-free.
Your host’s primary priority should be data security in general. A secure website may be maintained via regular monitoring, automated backups, and good infrastructure.
Summary
Too many recently launched websites suffer from the same issues: weak security, a slow loading speed, and no assistance because of a subpar web host. Although using a basic shared host at first can appear inexpensive, the financial damage is not worth it.
When selecting an e-commerce hosting service, you should choose one that provides plans that are both highly inexpensive and capable of scaling to meet your company’s demands. For this, we recommend you take a look at ASPHostPortal.