Choosing the Best Web Hosting Plan for E-Commerce Websites

The web hosting company you choose will make a huge difference to how fast, secure and reliable your ecommerce website is. It will define how customers view your store, and whether or not they feel comfortable giving you their credit card details.

Look for a host with server configurations optimally configured to manage the load of ecommerce websites, and look for network security features such as DDoS protection and secure data centres.

Scalability

If you’re building an ecommerce store, it’s important to choose a web hosting plan that grows with your business. A web hosting company with higher bandwidth and storage will let you scale up your website without technical knowledge. Connectivity is essential, so look for a hosting provider that offers a control panel that’s easy to use.

In the case where your business grows considerably and you acquire a bigger website, dedicated hosting is what you will need. Also, as the name suggests, this type of web hosting gives you total control over your store as it puts your site online through its very own server. This is because the server, unlike shared hosting where numerous websites have a share, is exclusively yours and your sites’ to own.
Colocation hosting, on the other hand, places your hardwares of the server within a data center in physical terms and then provide extra resources such as power and internet by which your website or part of your business runs.

Shopping cart platforms allow you to sell online while marketing tools help with retaining customers, so finding a hosting provider that supports multiple carts and marketing tools means checking out is easier for your customers, plus more customers will come and you’ll start growing revenue.

Security

Ecommerce websites store business data, contact information, product images and audio-video content. The host should provide me with an adequate amount of space to store all this data. Other ways in which you can make me happy by choosing you are providing me a free SSL certificate and PCI DSS compliance certification for credit card checking and processing. You should also provide me with site-level security and useful control panel so that my website is easy for visitors to interact with.

To do that, an ecommerce website needs to be put on servers that accommodate various and significant files and more than a specified number of visits at a time. Apart from having scalable servers that can conveniently store any number of files and visitors with high-speed connections, a good web host should make sure that their servers are physically located near their target customers to cut down the travel time of data, and should also use some kind of caching techniques that improve site performance.

Another important factor when picking an ecommerce web hosting plan is an uptime guarantee. When the site’s not available, they don’t buy more stuff, and that means money out your pocket. Worse, spending any time at all without your site up can cause your customers to wonder if something is wrong, and they might not want to do business after that. Keeping your site online 99.9 per cent of the time should be the minimum goal for an ecommerce hosting provider, and they’ll often include site-monitoring tools so if something goes wrong with your hardware or software, they catch it quickly and get things back up ASAP.

Customer support

The key to good performance of your eCommerce website is also, of course, its host; and while looking for a host with customer support can help to deal with the unavoidable problems, do ensure that your host has a support team that is reliable, with a live person ready to answer your questions as soon as they arise. Compare prices and check for features when it comes to your web host as well – finding one that is suited to your budget is crucial.

Furthermore, the best eCommerce hosts will offer customer support, and provide you with features specifically geared to boost your online store. That includes shopping cart software and inventory management tools to create the simplest checkout for customers, as well as the guarantee of scalability and uptime to keep your store running smoothly.

Hosting providers should provide higher performance with the help of good quality servers and data centres, fast response from the web servers through global-level distributed CDN’s and free generation of SSL to secure websites against any hacking attempts or any other cybercriminal activities to the data available on websites. This way the data is secured against any possible hacking attacks or other destructive methods that are usually adopted by other parties to penetrate the data in the most perilous consequences.

Pricing

Finding the right web hosting plan is key to the success of your ecommerce business because a top host can speed up websites, provide strong security, and offer features tailored to growing businesses. Ecommerce sites need more storage and bandwidth than a blog, as product catalogues, images and videos will be uploaded to it – so finding a host with scalable plans allows you to add more resources to your website as your company grows.

Pricing for ecommerce hosting can vary based on your needs — your website’s traffic, for example — and will depend on the kind of hosting you choose. The type of hosting you purchase will have the most dramatic effect on cost, with shared hosting being the least expensive and dedicated server hosting the most costly. Look for hosting plans with unlimited bandwidth to avoid surprise fees for sudden traffic bumps, and make sure you have a hosting provider who can customise server specs to improve the performance and security impacts of online payment processing or point of sale (POS) tools your business might use.