E-commerce hosting is a web hosting platform where the hosting provider renders options and resources to the e-commerce company to trade their products and services over their website. For example, the hosting services include payment processing services, security initiatives, SSL, shopping cart software, templates for developing virtual storefronts or online catalogues, tools for tracking and handling inventory, and many other resources. The hosting provider will provide your e-commerce website with a web server and make it available to all the users over the Internet while offering all the mentioned services.
Many e-commerce web hosting providers in the market can offer you a wide range of hosting plans. To consider any of them, you must first observe some factors related to your e-commerce websites, such as sales volume, traffic, site size, budget, and web development experience. It will help you to opt for the right hosting plan for your business. The right hosting will let you generate the income that you are aiming for through your online business.
Moreover, the following sections will help you to understand how the right e-commerce web hosting plan can impact your business and how you can decide whether the hosting plan you choose will serve you the best or not. Let’s begin on this note.
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Why it’s important to choose the right e-commerce hosting plan?
The hosting facility will store your website content files and provide the services required to operate your website efficiently. However, various hosting companies offer different level of services according to their capabilities. Thus, if you do not choose the right host, it can impact your e-commerce website in the following ways –
Customers will leave a slow site.
More than half of the users do not hold on to a site in today’s time if it takes more than two seconds to load a page. The users tend to leave such websites with the low page load speed and hop to other sites searching for their requirements. On the other side, Google makes use of the site speed as a ranking determinant. The reason behind this is that the search engines will have to take a longer time to give results if they cannot discover and index websites quickly. Therefore, if your web pages have slow load speeds, Google will skip to index them.
The right hosting company makes sure to provide your websites with the least loading time. It manages the load speed through caching and Content Delivery Networks (CDN).
Customers may not be able to access non-secured sites.
To initiate your e-commerce website, you need to execute all the security measures so that the customers will not hesitate to visit your website and make purchases. Every browser provides different layers of security features. Indeed, Chrome is one of them, and it aims to provide its users with maximum security. That is why it is also the most prevalent and reliable browser.
In case you do not make your e-commerce website HTTPS encrypted, Google will identify and display the user your site as “not secure”. It will make the users lose confidence in your website, and they will not attempt to access it.
The right host will provide your website with Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificates to enable HTTPS encryption and build trust with Google and your consumers.
Downtime can badly impact your business.
Suppose your customers are unable to access your site due to downtime, and in turn, no purchasing is happening. In that case, you wil begin to lose revenues and suffer a considerable amount of loss during a period of time. The total amount of income lost will depend upon your website’s sales volume, traffic, and the number of people impacted. It also depends on the time of the day when downtime happens.
Consequently, you will not only lose money but more importantly, you will lose the potential customers and the reputation in the market. The downtime can come out as a threat and is capable of sinking your entire business. Thus, it will be best to find the web host who provides the maximum uptime and 24&*7 monitoring service for your website to deal with the downtime in case it happens.
Now that you know how your website and business can be impacted without the right hosting services, let us mention the factors you must consider before choosing any hosting provider for your website.
Factors to Consider before selecting the Hosting Plan
E-Commerce and CMS software support
You will find various eCommerce and CMS software available in the market, such as Magento, OpenCart, OsCommerce, ZenCart, BigCommerce, PrestaShop, WooCommerce, DrupalCommerce, etc. You must ensure that the hosting plan you choose must be compatible with the required software. If you attempt to switch in the future, it can cost you additional migration complexity, expenses, and unavoidable influences on your customer experience.
Software authority
You will require more control over software in an e-commerce website as compared to a simple informational website. You have to make sure that the software updates are taking place in time so that the site does not bring up any compatibility problems. Some of the e-commerce websites can require multiple MySQL databases. Hence you should find the right hosting plan that carries such multiple databases too. It is recommended to search the e-commerce web hosting plan that enables you to customize your operating software.
Database supporting capabilities
The databases lie at the core of the E-commerce website as it sustains all the product and customer details. That is why your E-commerce hosting plan must provide your website with robust and reliable support for the databases.
It will be a wise decision to confirm that the hosting plan gives assistance and services to the expected number of files and size of your database so that your website does not encounter any performance issues or limitations in the resources.
High database requests support
Your business products will be browsed by hundreds and thousands of user. It will definitely put pressure on the product database. Your hosting plan must let your website respond to all the clients in no time. It should provide high processing power and an optimized concurrent database connection limit.
High traffic maintenance
Your hosting plan must have the ability to handle the sudden increase in traffic. It is recommended not to opt for shared hosting plans for e-commerce websites. As when other websites consume extra resources, it will have a destructive impact on your e-commerce website. It will be best to choose the hosting plan that can provide you with an isolated environment with dedicated resources. Moreover, such an isolated environment will also guarantee you more comprehensive privacy and security for your customer data.
Error and log files access
There can be times when some of the issues can happen related to your e-commerce websites’ operations. Thus, your web developer must have access to error and log files so that the problem can get detected and debugged at the earliest possible time.
Management of administrative complexity
With the progress of your E-commerce business website, there will be an increase in administrative complexity. You require to look out for hosting plans that can handle server management and administration’s excessive burden so that you do not have to spend much time, money, and other resources. It will help to maintain your productivity in your business.
Confirm with your host provider if you can expect to manage your website during the administrative complexity. Further, you can check if you will be provided with the easy-to-use visual interface or not and many other such requirements.
Launching or upgrading an e-commerce website will leave you with more complexity than a typical website. So, ensuring that you take a service from the right hosting provider will make the process simpler. The ideal hosting plan should offer you a blend of dedicated resources with simple administration, reliable security, and risk management to support your business’s advancement and exceed customer expectations.
