Because it affects how well and how efficiently your online store functions, hosting is essential for e-commerce. Hosting gives your e-commerce website the physical space on the internet that it requires to be accessed. Your website is effectively a digital storefront.
Web hosting services, which give you server space to host your website and make it reachable online, are a common component of e-commerce hosting. E-commerce hosting companies may additionally supply extras like website builders, payment processing integrations, security features for credit card payments, shopping cart software, content delivery networks (CDN), and payment processing integrations.
Making a selection about which web hosting provider to select can be difficult, like most things. There must be a method to cut through the lingo and get an informed selection, what with all the businesses out there each claiming to offer 99% uptime, limitless resources, and skilled assistance. Right?
What is Hosting For E-commerce?
In other words, hosting gives your website a server to live on, enabling it to be active and reachable via the Internet. Your online home is there!
A hosting plan specifically made for e-commerce websites is known as e-commerce hosting. It provides all of the features and specifications required to operate an e-commerce website. A payment gateway, security, an SSL certificate, and the capacity to scale during a traffic increase might be included in the package.
There are various hosting plan categories. Based on the technical specifications of the server, you could select shared hosting, virtual private servers, or dedicated hosting. The alternative is to select hosting plans created especially for e-commerce websites, such as WordPress Hosting and WooCommerce Hosting.
However, even while the type of hosting you select for your e-commerce website is crucial, the e-commerce hosting service you decide to work with is much more crucial.
BigCommerce:
BigCommerce has long been a highly-liked option for small-to-medium businesses, but more recently, mid-market and corporate businesses have started to favor it as well. It includes a simple interface, top-rated SEO, a lot of native functionality, and the benefits of SaaS (such as a lower TCO and faster implementation time).
BigCommerce provides robust headless commerce capabilities and extremely flexible APIs (more on that later). To make the re-platforming process easier, BigCommerce provides customized Enterprise Customer Onboarding, catalog transfer services, and extensive instructional resources. To serve the needs of BigCommerce Enterprise clients, enterprise account managers, and technical account managers additionally offer additional resources and individualized assistance.
In addition, BigCommerce has a sizable group of partners and companies who are knowledgeable about the platform and can help with design, development, and SEO requirements. The platform has more native functionality than some other platforms, hence understanding the platform may be more challenging. However, BigCommerce University offers specialized training that can quickly get you and your team up to speed on the platform. This training is available on campus, on-site, and on-demand.
Key Factors to Consider:
Certain elements can be negotiated, such as the type of security add-ons included in your hosting package or the hosting fee that is just a little bit higher than your budget. But when choosing an e-commerce hosting package, some elements are simply non-negotiable and that you must have. The following are some of these unchangeables:
1. Uptime of 99.99%:
Your e-commerce website must be quick and operational at all times. Your choice of an e-commerce hosting company must ensure a speedy load time; the minimum need is 99.99% uptime! If a website takes too long to load or is unresponsive, the majority of visitors leave, never to return. Shared hosting is one hosting type that is not advised for e-commerce websites since it may experience frequent downtime, which could result in a loss of revenue. Your e-commerce hosting package must contain a CDN, a network of servers dispersed throughout a large area that is essential to maintaining a quick website. Look for a plan that includes uptime monitoring so you may be informed if there is an issue.
2. Simple Scalability:
Scalable hosting is a requirement in the case of an e-commerce website. Holiday seasons, sales, promotions, and other events could increase website visitors. Your e-commerce hosting plan must enable you to grow the resources during these times to handle the increase. To prevent a bad shopping experience for your clients, CPU, RAM, storage, and all other necessary resources must be easily expandable.
3. Unrestricted Bandwidth and Storage:
Product photos, videos, and other website files take up a lot of space on big e-commerce websites. E-commerce websites frequently experience heavy traffic, which necessitates additional storage, bandwidth, and space. If you don’t pick an e-commerce hosting company that offers unlimited bandwidth and storage, you’ll end up paying far more in overage costs than you had planned.
4. Advanced Protection:
Customers are expected to provide their personal and financial information on an e-commerce website to transact business with you and continue offering them individualized services. In exchange, your clients anticipate that you’ll safeguard this information. Hackers may easily gather personal data, credit card numbers, bank account details, and more from e-commerce websites. To protect your company, clients, and reputation, you as the owner of an online store must make sure your website is extremely secure. Advanced security features like firewalls, SSL certificates, malware, DDoS attack detection and monitoring, etc., must be offered by your e-commerce hosting provider.
5. Constant Help:
Even if you select the greatest e-commerce hosting service and have all the required plugins and tools in place, there is a potential that your website will occasionally experience problems. To assist you in these situations and provide the appropriate solution, your hosting provider must be easily accessible. Your e-commerce hosting provider must give around-the-clock assistance to help you recover and carry on operating, whether your website speed is compromised, you need to expand resources to handle traffic, there has been an attack, or you require any other assistance.
6. Integration of Payment:
You must be able to quickly integrate all the payment options that your target audience demands with your e-commerce hosting provider. These days, the majority of people look for numerous, simple payment choices on an e-commerce website, and this could be the turning point in a customer’s purchasing process. Your e-commerce hosting provider must enable you to integrate all and any payment integration you require, including debit and credit cards, UPI, cash on delivery, and bank transfers. For instance, Bluehost now enables its clients to quickly integrate Razorpay with their Bluehost online store due to Razorpay’s increasing popularity in India. Additionally, confirm PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliance with your e-commerce hosting provider. These security guidelines protect user information security.
7. Autonomous Backups:
Backups of data are essential for e-commerce platforms. The files and data in your online store are safeguarded by automatic backups. Changing some important settings can easily cause your database to become corrupt, which could result in significant losses. It can be impossible or very difficult to get everything back up and running if you don’t have the most current backup. Automatic backups are a requirement for your e-commerce hosting service to further increase website security.
You receive all of this and more with Bluehost’s WooCommerce hosting! Create your WooCommerce online store with all the features a successful e-commerce site needs.
8. Options For Refund:
Some web hosts offer a predetermined time frame with a money-back guarantee.
The best refund policies are those that are simple to use while you are testing out a web hosting provider. This enables you to pay to test out their service and see whether it meets the needs of your company. At least it’s simple to get your money back if you decide their service wasn’t worth the money you paid.
People who struggle to get refunds from a web hosting company typically vent their dissatisfaction online. If you want to verify that the money-back guarantee is as hassle-free as the provider claims, you can look up these complaints online (often on forums or review sites).
9. Additional Features:
Examining their supplementary features should tip the scales if you’ve located several potential web hosting providers but are having trouble choosing one.
The following are a few practical supplementary features:
- Free or limitless email accounts
- Site transfers are free.
- availability of cPanel
- CDN accessibility
- WordPress installation with a single click and site builder access
- The specific location of the data center
10. Feedback From Customers and Reputation:
To get the real story of this element, you’ll need to use a little imagination. Look for a certain hosting provider on Twitter or conduct a Google Blog search to find out what their current (or previous) clients are saying about them. Can you reach them easily for assistance? How long does it typically take to react to a ticket? What do they do if they discover an issue with a website?
Conclusion:
Last but not least, whether or not your hosting company (and the plan you select) fits into your future goals is a crucial factor to take into account. To put it another way, once you start selling your goods online and start receiving excellent traffic to your website, what you currently consider appropriate hosting may no longer be sufficient to suit your demands.
Any web-based business should be looking to expand, thus it could be problematic if a hosting provider has trouble doing so. Does the host offer dedicated or virtual private servers? Can they update your account without any difficulty?
Moving from one host to another requires time and effort that could be saved if the business could scale its solutions for expansion. Make an informed conclusion by doing some research, gathering feedback, and considering all of the above. Finding the ideal host helps e-commerce businesses avoid several problems. Business to business will have different use cases, but some elements apply in every situation.
Business owners can find an e-commerce hosting plan that is perfect for their needs by keeping these in mind.
FAQs:
How much does Hosting for Online Stores Cost?
E-commerce hosting fees can change depending on several variables, including the kind of hosting, the features offered, and the hosting company.
Depending on the hosting company and the features offered, shared hosting plans for e-commerce websites can vary. For instance, if you haven’t previously registered your domain name, free domains may lower the overall cost of the hosting package. The characteristics, features, and hosting environment of the server all affect dedicated hosting plans for e-commerce websites. Unmetered bandwidth is one of the features that could incur extra charges.
What Distinguishes Shared Hosting from Dedicated Hosting?
Multiple websites that use shared hosting share a single server’s resources, including memory, CPU, and disk space.
VPS hosting is another option; it is comparable to shared hosting but offers more customization. As opposed to shared hosting, dedicated hosting provides a server that is, well, exclusively used for a single website or application.
When looking for E-Commerce hosting, what Should be your top Priority?
To protect your company, clients, and reputation, you as the owner of an online store must make sure your website is extremely secure. Advanced security features like firewalls, SSL certificates, malware, DDoS attack detection and monitoring, etc., must be offered by your e-commerce hosting provider.
What Features should a Successful E-commerce website have?
Easy to use navigation. To assist customers in finding the products they require quickly, a user-friendly navigation system is essential. Product Videos, Product Reviews, Generous Return Policy, FAQ for Products, FAQ for the Store, Site Search, Footer Navigation,
Which six Criteria Apply to Websites?
When assessing any website, the following six (6) factors should be used: authority, accuracy, objectivity, currency, coverage, and appearance. Various questions should be asked for each criterion. The more “yes” responses you can give, the more probable it is that the website is one of quality. The news, what news?
