Choosing the right eCommerce hosting provider is more important than you think. Many businesses fail in the online sphere because their hosting services provide them with inadequate security, poor management of web servers, and awful loading speeds.
So, what are the important features of a web hosting services?
Let us find out.
Types of Ecommerce Hosting
There are different kinds of hosting which determine the setup and hardware of your server. Broadly, there are three main kinds: VPS, shared, and dedicated hosting.
- Shared hosting is the most basic type. If you are a startup or an individual who just wants an online presence, then shared hosting is the right pick for you. The costs are low, but the speed suffers, and the server space you receive is shared with multiple different sites.
- The full form for VPS is virtual private server. The machine between your server and other websites is common in VPS web hosting, but the resources you receive are allocated to you alone. So, you do not face any of the problems related to shared hosting.
- Dedicated hosting offers you your own private and physical server. Obviously, this comes at a high cost.
Hosting Services should provide High Performance
Speed and reliability should be your first priority while looking at various web hosting options. Customers tend to exit the website if they feel that it takes a lot of time to load.
They do not wait for more than three seconds. Eighty percent of them do not revisit the website.
When you choose to go for shared hosting, the website will be slow and frequently suffer outages. This leads to poor customer retention for any online store. You have to be cautious while choosing hosts since many do not have the required infrastructure, which often leads to crashes and slowdowns.
File Storage and Bandwidth
Ecommerce sites occupy a lot of space on your disk. They also attract a lot of traffic in most cases. So, go for the online services that can provide the most resources. If this is not the case, you might end up paying high overage costs.
Any eCommerce solution is incomplete without images, and you need a lot of them to provide an enriching experience to the visitors. So, you might not realize it, and your storage might be over fast. Whenever you upload a product, you need high-resolution pictures to accompany it.
Auto-Scaling
The growth of online businesses is unpredictable since the growth trajectory varies a lot. So, the traffic you end up receiving varies a lot from day to day. When it’s the holiday season, the traffic grows at an exponential rate.
Customers who have never shopped online are consumed by the online world. There is a sudden growth that cannot be accounted for.
Excellent hosting services provide two kinds of scaling: auto-scaling, usually during holiday periods when there is a sudden growth spurt, and the second one is scalable resourcing. In scalable resourcing, the host provides you with additional resources proportionally to your growth.
Auto-scaling is advisable for all online stores due to the traffic surges during specific times of the year. You might want to stick with your original plan, but you might fall short of resources when many shoppers are interested in what you offer.
Proactive Support and Service
You will come across various bugs and errors in your site as time progresses. If you do not have an active support team that assists you with these issues, your site could be down for quite some time. You should ensure that the support provided is helpful, quick, cordial, and cooperate with you in a manner that yields results.
The support team should have members that are experienced developers. If the web hosting services have a robust infrastructure and you do not experience any downtime, then it is probable that the support team is good at what they do. If there are internal issues within the site, they can’t do anything. However, if there is something wrong with the server, they will fix it from their end.
Maximum Security
Ecommerce sites often bear the brunt of hacking attempts due to the amount of sensitive information they contain. They have PayPal passwords, bank passwords, credit card numbers, and other personal details like the names and complete addresses of the users.
Hacking an eCommerce site with poor security gives easy returns. New companies do not have the expertise on how to keep this data safe and sound. This is where a good website host comes in. They ensure fool-proof security to your and your customers’ data.
Read More: Choosing Dedicated Hosting | 000Webhost Free Hosting | Hub8 Free Hosting | Reliable and Affordable Hosting in Nigeria
Your developers can only secure your code, but after that, any successful hack is caused by the lack of security on the part of the web host. If there are glitches in the server code, malicious entities can attack your website and gain access to user data.
