How to Choose the Best eCommerce Hosting Services

What Should You Know Before Purchasing an eCommerce Hosting Plan?

If you are running an online eCommerce business, then it’s important to know how to choose the best eCommerce hosting provider. Many businesses fail because of bad loading speed, improperly managed servers, and poor security. So what makes the best eCommerce hosting services? Let’s go over the key qualities to look for.

A web host provides a server for your website, which gives your platform a basis to reside on and the ability to connect to the internet, which enables people to visit your website. Essentially though, you are paying for the rights of server space that is not in use and the services of a company that knows how to manage, secure, and divide the server space.

Hosting comes in different forms that has a variety of required specializations. For instance, HIPAA-compliant hosting will be different from hosting that primarily deals with international eCommerce. Some hosting types are named after the specific hardware they use, and others have special plans, with each plan containing unique features and functionality.

High-quality eCommerce hosting packages have special features bundled, which are often useful for eCommerce businesses. These features include free SSL encryption, assistance setting up payment gateways, scaling during high traffic time periods, or extra security. As a subtype of eCommerce hosting, WooCommerce hosting has these features and more. It comes with a server environment that is optimized to execute the WooCommerce plugin.

Why is Choosing the Right Host Important?

When you make a website, the data files need to be stored somewhere. As a website owner, you have to pay rent for the space you use on a host’s server. However, choosing which company to house your website is important for the functionality of your website and therefore its success.

Research shows that websites only have a few seconds to load before visitors go off to another site. The host’s ability to enable fast load times along with your page optimization needs to allow the website or webpage to load within that time. Each second in reduced load time increases traffic and conversions by a staggering amount. The best eCommerce hosting company can manage the volume of visitors that they offer and that you are expecting. The host should also consider factors such as traffic spikes that can slow down the site if the server isn’t prepared.

Proper security is essential to building trust and credibility with your business and eCommerce platform. Anyone can start an eCommerce site, but proper security is needed to be implemented by any business before their sales start. Just adding a button to collect credit card information is not enough.

You can see that every browser is different, and they have variant security features from one another. Chrome keeps its consumers safe while searching for a piece of information on the web, and it makes it one of the most popular browsers.

This is why your site needs to be encrypted with HTTPS; otherwise, it will be identified as Not Secure when your visitors will be using the Chrome browser. This, in turn, will make customers distrust your site and be less willing to interact with it.

If customers are unable to access your site, they won’t be making purchases or interacting with your platform in other ways. They may leave the site to make a purchase elsewhere. Even one hour of downtime or less results in lost revenue. Some web hosting companies schedule planned maintenance, which can cause your site to go down. The timing of this maintenance affects how many sales will be lost, since some hours of the day can expect more site activity than others. Keeping an eye on this time schedule will help you know when the best times are to schedule maintenance—and be sure not to have the site be down too frequently, either.

Also, it’s important that maintenance is only done as necessary—if your host is scheduling maintenance but not actually fixing or updating anything substantial, then you may want to evaluate their performance as a provider. Putting notifications up on the site and sending notifications to customers to let them know when the site will be down will also go a long way towards mitigating the issues associated with site downtime.

Qualities to Look for in eCommerce Hosting Companies

There are some features that every host should have, such as:

• High Performance
• Bandwidth and file storage
• Auto-scaling
• Full security
• Automatic backups
• Developer-friendly environment

Each of these qualities is detailed below.

A host provider needs to be reliable and fast. A webpage’s load time should be less than three seconds—according to research, 70-80 percent of visitors leave a site that takes longer than three seconds to load, and 80 percent never come back.

It’s best to avoid shred hosting, as it can slow down your website and experiences frequent downtime. Some hosts have unpredictable infrastructure, resulting in crashes and slow downloading. While every company advertises that they are the best and have the fastest services, many cannot uphold those standards. Therefore, it’s advisable to check that your potential host provider has performance and uptime monitoring and alerts systems if something goes wrong.

eCommerce websites often need lots of file space and the ability to handle lots of traffic. You need a host with enough resources for you because no one wants to pay overage fees. High-quality images are a key part of the design in eCommerce websites, and these take up a lot of storage. As the store grows bigger, you need enough space to accommodate these additional files.

eCommerce website can be a little less predictable than other types of websites, and the market can shift in your favor resulting in a sharp rise in sales. Therefore, two types of scaling need to be considered when it comes to choosing an eCommerce web host. One is auto-scaling during sudden traffic increases and scalable resources which grow with you.

Auto-scaling is a necessity for eCommerce stores due to sudden surges in traffic. Your regular plan should suit your site well for at least a year, with the exception of the holiday season and rush on your site. Auto-scaling automatically allocates the resources on your website and will keep it safe from downtime especially during these times of high traffic.

Hackers often track eCommerce sites, and this is due to associated sensitive data like bank details, credit card numbers, and PayPal accounts. If your website is not secure enough and implementing the latest security features, it can become vulnerable and get hacked. This compromises not just your business but all the buyers and sellers on your website. Making sure your host is continuously updating and checking security is essential to protecting your business’s and customers’ data.

As a developer, you may want to have access to advanced options for server processes for your website. It can be difficult to find a host that will enable these features, because web hosts don’t want to take risks by giving beginners access to critical files that might result in the whole site crashing if something is incorrectly altered. Therefore, it’s best to find a host that can understand your level of expertise as a developer and can easily work with that.

Grow Successfully By Avoiding Common Pitfalls

Many new eCommerce business websites failed because of some common issues like poor security, poor support, low speed, low space, and many others. If you want to avoid all of them, you need to get a hosting with all of the features discussed above with affordable plans.

Additional Resources for eCommerce

• Clarity eCommerce Framework™
• Key Marketplace Considerations
• Clarity Connect™
• HIPAA-Compliant Web Hosting
• Key Considerations for Your eAuction Platform