Planning to start your eCommerce store? That’s a great online business to start today. This is because the e-commerce business is booming as people are taking more interest in shopping online rather than window shopping. To develop a good e-commerce website, you need to follow many steps such as deciding your products to sell, selecting a good shopping cart, finding the best web hosting provider, etc.
From all these, the puzzling one is to select the best web hosting provider. You will find numerous web hosting providers that offer a wide range of hosting services such as, shared, dedicated, VPS, unlimited web hosting, managed WordPress hosting, cloud, etc. Each of the web hosts tries to give its best through the hosting solution and so, selecting the best one is very tough.
Being an eCommerce website owner, you might have planned of opting for a web hosting provider that offers all the features but at the affordable price. Getting such a provider is no big deal if you look for certain features offered by them. In this article, you will get an idea about selecting the right hosting solution for your ecommerce store. Let’s check what to look for in a web hosting solution for your ecommerce website.
Features that a Right Web Hosting Solution Should Offer for Your Ecommerce Store
Premium Web Hosting Service
Website speed plays a significant role in the growth of an eCommerce website. Therefore, it is important that each page of your eCommerce website loads quickly after it is requested by your visitors. This helps in converting your visitors to more extent. So, if you are in search for a free web hosting provider, stop it right now. The reason behind this is that it will lead to many troubles later on.
As per a survey, if there is just a second’s delay in page loading, it can decrease the customer satisfaction by 16% and increase the conversion loss by up to 7%. Your ecommerce business would run into loss, if your website pages take 2-3 seconds to load.
This isn’t just the reason for losing your customers. Glitches, website crashes or error reports are also responsible for the loss of customers. Therefore, it is recommended to select a premium web host to avoid going through such situations that might lead to a great loss. You will surely get the value for money by investing in a premium web hosting solution.
Check for the Hardware
A quality web host will always offer fast as well as reliable hardware. No doubt just the hardware can’t give you the surety for the excellent website performance but it is the first step in the website performance.
Data Center Tiers
Do you know there are 4 types of data centers? Yes, they are based on the infrastructure’s ability to offer a definite level of website performance throughout the year. Many web hosting providers, therefore, have Tier-4 data centers as they offer high reliability with their complete redundancy and also, guarantee up to 99.999% uptime annually.
Number of Data Centers and Their Locations
It is always better to opt for ecommerce web hosting provider that has more data centers. Do you know why? When your vital data is duplicated and stored in different data centers by the web host, it reduces the chance of any data center failure, keeping your website always up. Additionally, your website back-ups are saved in multiple data centers which help to reduce the data recovery time, if any data center faces problems such as fire, floods or other natural disasters.
If the data center is located far away from your target audience, it will take a long time for content delivery. Therefore, make sure the web host you select offers you server location in multiple geographic locations. This will help to improve your website performance by speeding up the page load time.
Latest Hardware
It isn’t necessary that something that was the best for your online business a few years ago will be good enough for it today. So, check for another e-commerce store that uses the fastest hardware offered by their hosting providers. It is important that your web host uses the fastest hardware to enhance your website’s performance.
Get Better Performance for High Traffic
As your ecommerce store grows, your web host should be able to maintain it. If you are on a shared server then it is for sure that you will outgrow it.
Your web host must be able to handle your increasing website traffic and provide you resources along with maintaining the store’s performance. Your web host should offer you options such as VPS, dedicated cloud or managed server, if you want to upgrade to meet the needs of your growing website traffic.
Higher Uptime
Do you think you will earn any money if your website goes offline? Can’t imagine, right? So, uptime plays a key role in keeping your website always online. If you get poor uptime from your web host, your visitors will start looking for other ecommerce stores. Hence, while selecting a web host, make sure that you will get guaranteed uptime.
Also, you should get on-site tech support from the experts to help you in fixing the issues on your website at any time of the day. Routine upgrades also are a must. So, a good web host needs to deliver an uptime of 99.9% or even better than that.
Your website shouldn’t face a downtime of more than 90 minutes per month. Don’t just look for the web hosts that offer you guarantee on its service, instead find a web host that can show you the demo of its track record for the uptime.
Customer Service
What if your website isn’t running properly due to some technical issue? Your visitors will switch to other ecommerce store to buy their desired product. No one wants this to happen with their ecommerce business. Therefore, it is important that your web host should offer 24/7 live support to you. You should be able to reach them via various options such as live chat, email or phone. Prefer the web host that offers in-house customer support as they understand their company’s operations better than the outsourced customer support service.
Availability Of Site Backups
There is an increase in the number of online extortionists which target even the general websites. These types of actions lead to damages such as destruction or replacement of your site’s index.php file. You might also experience server or local hard disk failures which might lead to huge losses. So, make sure your web host offers you on-site website data backup.
SSL Encryption
Since you are running an eCommerce store, it is important for you to see that your customers’ data remains secure. Your customers share sensitive information such as credit card or banking details and so, it should be encrypted at every step. This can be done by installing an SSL certificate on your online store.
Many web hosts offer SSL certificate with your hosting plan without any additional charges. So, you can select a web hosting service for your ecommerce store that offers free SSL certificate with their hosting plans.
Scalability
The ecommerce industry keeps on changing as fast as your business does. Your host should therefore, have the capability to meet your business needs in future by easily adding or cancelling extra services (additional servers, CDN, etc.).
Ability To Add Domains
When your website grows, you will realize that you require multiple websites, domains and subdomains. So, prior to signing up for a hosting provider, check for the different packages offered and also pay keen attention to if you are allowed to run multiple websites on a single web hosting account.
Check for the unlimited website and subdomain package prices and compare them to the other industry players. It means take your time to select a web host that offers different service plans that allow you to add new domains and scale over time.
Price
Pricing is where many of you get stuck. All want a hosting provider that offers affordable services. Since the pricing of shared hosting plans are quite cheap many opt for it. This would surely be a mistake for an ecommerce store. To be honest, a web host that offers services at less than $3 per month won’t offer you free SSL or 24/7 tech support.
Therefore, instead of comparing the pricing plans compare the features of the web hosts. Check for the important features for your business and leave the irrelevant ones.
Conclusion
You are offered several features by your web hosting provider which helps them to differentiate from each other. Just find the ones that best suit your business needs. Remember user experience is a key ingredient for giving you popularity as well as profit. If your user experience is not good, you might need to struggle to make your ecommerce business successful. So, tie-up with a provider that offers all the necessary features that helps you in enhancing the user experience.
