Hosting for ecommerce websites is the most important aspect when managing your online store. With a good eCommerce hosting provider, your website can have accessible payment processing service, online security, SSL, attractive theme and layout, etc., which all contribute to a good online shopping experience for your customers.
However, there are too many eCommerce hosting website providers that keep on appearing. Some of them offer a cheaper deal, some of them may be too expensive for you, and some of them have so many features and you may not be familiar with all of them, and some lack the features you need specifically for your website.
With all the various factors you need to consider, it’s pretty hard to decide on how to choose the right eCommerce hosting or which is the best website for eCommerce hosting. Trying to look for the best one may take you a lot of research time. So to help you out in filtering eCommerce hosting sites, here are the key qualities you should look for.
Top 10 Factors to Consider on How to Choose the Right eCommerce Hosting for Your Business:
1. Bandwidth and file storage
A good hosting provider needs enough hosting bandwidth so it can support all your files and run your website well. eCommerce websites may need a lot of file storage since the main purpose is to receive a lot of traffic. Thus, eCommerce hosting sites need enough resources to keep up with all the files you want to input on your website.
Most eCommerce websites have a lot of images displayed since it is a key factor when selling products. Also, these images are all high-resolution to make it more attractive for customers to see clear and detailed photos of the product to convince them to buy. With just these images alone, it will already consume a lot of space.
If you already have a chosen provider, make sure you check with them if they have enough bandwidth and storage to host a business website properly.
2. Web Security for ecommerce hosting
eCommerce websites are the most prone to attacks by hackers. Since eCommerce websites contain a lot of sensitive data, such as credit card numbers, bank accounts, online wallets, even the complete name and address of the customers.
Your top priority is to keep your customer’s information safe from a security breach. You can earn their trust well if they know it’s safe to browse and buy products on your website. Thus, you need website security to guard important data on your site from unwanted cyberattacks.
That’s why you need to look for eCommerce hosting platforms that include SSL certificates to ensure your business website is safe and protected from hackers. Visitors to your website can do this by looking for a lock icon beside the URL. If they see it on your website, they know your site is trustworthy and assure them their information won’t be at risk when purchasing an item/s on your online store.
Hosting for eCommerce websites is more protected when it has a security software called Sitelock. It provides stronger protection against high-profile security breaches.
3. Software compatibility
An effective eCommerce website should have shopping cart functionality. With this, online shoppers can easily add items to their shopping cart while browsing on various items and checkout once they already feel satisfied. Another feature an online website needs to have is a safe and secure payment method.
Hosting for eCommerce websites should have a standard feature of the necessary software to add to the site. Some hosting plans include such features. While for some, you need to look for separate software and add it to your site.
Whichever you choose, the point is you need to ensure the web hosting plan is compatible with the features you want to add to make the process simpler for you.
4. Speed and performance of WebHost provider
Another important aspect on how to choose the right eCommerce hosting is its loading speed and performance. The truth is, most consumers online are impatient. This means a website that may take three to five seconds of loading may cause potential customers to leave the website. And thus, you also lose potential sales.
Web hosting plays a major role in providing fast speed on your website. What you should do is choose a web hosting plan that can handle the traffic without slowing the performance of the website. It’s also important to always check your website’s speed to know if you need to upgrade.
5. Consistent Uptime for website hosting
Hosting for eCommerce websites should have less downtime. The web hosting server should always work properly, so more and more customers can access it without any interruption.
However, hosting servers need to have occasional downtime as well for maintenance. The server must be well maintained so it can solve issues like hardware glitches and hacker attacks.
An unreliable hosting can cause more problems to your website, so you might as well go for the one with proven 99% website uptime.
6. Automatic data backups for e-commerce platforms
eCommerce cloud hosting should also have an automated data backup system to protect crucial database files of your website. If you don’t have any backup, you might lose important and sensitive information on your website. Though there may be ways on how to recover them, it may take a lot of time and effort before you can turn everything back under control. Or worse, you might end up losing all the data once your website crashes.
Imagine, it takes months and years and a lot of hard work to establish a good eCommerce website. And with just a single click or a mistake, you can lose everything. That’s why having an automatic backup system is a must.
Not all hosting plans have this feature included. For some, you might need to buy it as an add-on.
7. Email address
It’s common these days to find web hosting plans with email address support. Sending an email is one of the best options you can offer your customers if they need to inquire or ask about something.
Having an email address that matches your website’s domain can make your business look more professional and legitimate for your customers. It also helps to improve your branding.
8. SEO features
SEO is an important factor if you want to bring more traffic to your website and grow your business in the long run. eCommerce hosting providers should also have an SEO feature included in their plans.
A web hosting plan with SEO features can make it easier for you to customize your URLs, fill in meta descriptions, rank your website to search engines, provide keyword ranking, and give you competitive analysis reports.
Make it your priority to look for an eCommerce hosting that can help you with SEO for the growth of your online business website.
9. Website builder
You can buy a web hosting plan and website builder separately. However, there’s a more convenient option to save you time and money since there are lots of web hosting companies now that offer both.
Those who haven’t had any experience in website building often resort to hiring a designer who can do the job. To help beginners or those with zero skills in creating a website, website builders exist to offer an easier approach to design your website by yourself.
Website builders have a lot of templates to choose from that you can use for your website. To customize it according to what you like, you can simply just drag and drop some elements, choose better fonts, and select the colors you want.
With simple guides and easy-to-understand tutorials, you can make a lot of possibilities to build your website if you choose good quality website hosting.
10. Customer service support
This is not about how you provide service to your customers on your website. Instead, this talks about the support you will receive from the website hosting company in case you encounter some issues on your website.
It’s important to note that these hosting companies are reachable 24/7. So no matter when you need help since it’s pretty unpredictable when your website might crash, you can contact your web hosting provider easily and relay to them the problem. It’s a plus point if they have proven reviews on how they respond to their customers promptly.
However, availability is not the only issue. You also need to check if they can handle and solve any issues of their customers on their websites. In case they have records of subpar support on their customer’s concerns, might as well consider looking for a much better web hosting provider.
Final Thoughts
Looking for the best eCommerce hosting for small businesses is a good move to make if you want to grow it as soon as possible. With a good quality web hosting provider, you can benefit a lot from how you want to increase your online presence to your customers, gain a lot of traffic, and earn more sales.
But with the rising number of hosting providers these days, most with too good to be true offers, people still fall into the trap of getting deceived. Instead of having a website with high-quality performance, security, and visuals, what you have is something with a slow loading speed, lack of support from the company, and poor online security. But this guide on how to choose the right eCommerce hosting will defiantly help you to choose the right one.
Don’t settle for just cheap hosting plans, consider checking all the mentioned features here in this blog and weigh your options on which one you should choose that will benefit your business needs.