Ecommerce Hosting: 8 Things to Look for If You’re Serious About Your Store

If you are planning to start an online store, it is important to choose a good hosting company. If you already have an online store, you still have a choice of upgrading to a plan as offered by hosting companies.

eCommerce stores require constant upgrades and maintenance, the speed should also be amazing. If the user visits your eCommerce site and the speed is not good, it may lead to losses.

For an E-com website, the biggest challenge is to maximize sales. Also if the security is poor and the site is not managed properly, you’ll suffer more losses than profits in your business.

Why do you need to choose eCommerce hosting?

eCommerce hosting will provide availability and scalability both. If your site is less available, it would only mean lost sales. Slow loading pages may irritate visitors and the person would leave the site without purchase. eCommerce hosting will ensure that all the transactions made on your website are completely secured.

Ease of shopping carts and added features with hosting is also like an added advantage. eCommerce hosting offers you hosting solutions with less or no technical knowledge. The hosting also lets you manage multiple sites with a single admin panel control.

If you are considering eCommerce hosting, then it is important to look for some important aspects.

1. File Storage and Bandwidth

Most eCommerce sites take up a lot of bandwidth and storage, as they tend to pull more traffic as compared to normal sites. You need to choose a host that provides you with the best resources and features of bandwidth.

Even images are a key part of a site’s design. eCommerce sites tend to use a lot of storage. Every product that you upload on your eCommerce site may need high-resolution images and that will affect the space of the site.

You need to choose a hosting company that offers you complete resource usage. If the resources are used properly, they won’t affect the site’s space.

2. WooCommerce Integration

WooCommerce integration offers simple support and updates for a WordPress website. If your WordPress site lacks WooCommerce support, then your site may lack some added functionalities that are offered by WooCommerce.

WooCommerce integration plays an important role in eCommerce hosting. Optimization with WooCommerce allows WordPress a higher level of caching.

It allows users to automatically bypass the cache in the normal checkout process. It also provides an ability to program individual URLs of the page. Not all hosts offer WooCommerce integration.

When you choose a specific plan for your WordPress eCommerce site, you need to check for this. However, some hosting companies offer this integration in a customized hosting plan.

3. Proactive Support from Hosting Company

Your site could be down for hours when the hosting company is not available if there is an issue related to functionality. A web hosting company should have a good support backup for eCommerce hosting plans.

The support team should be fast, friendly, and should be able to solve your issues proactively. If you experience a normal downtime on your website, the support team should be instantly available to solve the website issues.

With eCommerce hosting, its a feasible option to look for a support team that is available 24/7. When all the site issues are resolved, it will drive more traffic to your site.

4. Performance

Finding a host that is completely reliable and offers you the best performance is important. Your eCommerce hosting company should include the feature of uptime monitoring and performance.

It should alert you when there is an error on-site or the site is completely down. Shared hosting solutions by hosting companies are not feasible for online stores. As there is constant traffic on the E-store, you need a plan that is performance-driven. Shared hosting has issues related to slow sped and downtime.

The infrastructure of the host should be reliable so that your website does not face any kind of crash issues. WordPress managed hosting provides with best features as compared to normal hosting.

Most plans are specially designed to suit eCommerce stores. You also need to choose a suitable CDN that should be available with your hosting plan.

CDN’s are a network of different servers distributed across a wide area. When the user tries to connect to your site routed by a nearby CDN server, it increases the load time.

5. Auto-scaling Option

eCommerce site traffic is variable if compared with other websites. Holidays and discounts can increase traffic on the eCommerce site. With a managed eCommerce hosting, you need to look for two types of scaling options.

Auto-scaling helps when there is a sudden surge of traffic on the site. And scalable resources that help you throughout to manage your site. Autoscaling is an important feature of eCommerce hosting.

When shoppers come rushing in, there is proper utilization of resources. With this feature, the resources are automatically available to the site with the surge in traffic. So, you won’t lose your precious time in business.

Along with auto-scaling options, look out for load balancing features as well. Load balancing will help to distribute your site traffic evenly and prevent downtime on the site. The auto-scaling option helps to improve the eCommerce site’s user engagement.

6. Security Control

An eCommerce site becomes vulnerable to hack attacks if there is no security control. eCommerce stores store sensitive information like credit card details, bank passwords, and addresses of users.

If the security is poor, then there may be a threat of data loss or hacking. A web hosting company should provide complete security control so that your store remains safe.

The security of your website and code also depends on the plan you choose. Though most web hosting providers offer added data security with eCommerce plans.

If there are flaws in data codes, it’ll allow easy access to information and user data. It is important to choose the best security features for your E-store.

7. Developer Friendly Environment

For a new developer working on an eCommerce site could be quite a challenging task. If you are a developer, then you need to choose advanced hosting options. A hosting company should offer you a developer-friendly environment.

There should be complete flexibility when the developer needs to update the core WordPress files or different versions of the site.

With a good E-com hosting plan, a developer may be able to create a staging environment, clone a site, or access SSH. Choose a plan that’ll help you create complete expediency with the staging environment.

8. Automatic Backups

Manual backups and updates are not only time consuming but also stressful. The hosting company should provide you with automatic backups.

Backups can be daily or weekly, but they should be able to protect your critical database files of the site. If you’re working with WordPress, you could accidentally delete a file.

At times even the database is corrupted, here’s when automatic backups can bail you out. Without a recent backup, it’ll make an effort to get back to the previous one.

A hosting company should provide complete backup solutions so that you don’t have to do it manually. Many hosting companies also provide an option of downloading backup files so that you have a complete reference.

To Sum up,

Lack of support, slow loading time, poor performance, and security are some common issues that are faced by a new eCommerce website. Before you choose an eCommerce hosting plan, take into account all the above aspects so that your websites scale better in the web space.

Lookout for hosting providers that offers the best features at affordable prices. Ecommerce pricing models differ a lot so you need to research your options well.

 

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