Long gone are the days when, when deciding on the best web hosting service, you just had to weigh bandwidth and storage space. Today, when deciding on the correct web host for your website, you have to follow a thorough review of the service provider and the benefits available.
At the same time, you should remember that various hosting service providers are ideal for hosting various types of sites in different ways. However, before committing to a service provider, there are some common but highly important considerations that you must remember.
e-Commerce Hosting
A quality hosting package for e-commerce is a bundle of special features tailored to this type of business. This may include free SSL encryption, helping to set up payment gateways, added protection, or scaling during high traffic periods.
WooCommerce hosting is also available, which could be considered a sub-type of e-commerce hosting. With server environments designed to run the WooCommerce plugin, WooCommerce hosting has all the functionality of e-commerce hosting and more.
Types of Hosting
There are several different hosting categories that you will need to know about, which decide the hardware and setup of your server. There are typically three primary kinds:
- Shared Hosting
- VPS Hosting
- Dedicated Hosting
The lowest tier, perfect for startups and people who just want to get online, is shared hosting. Typically, it’s inexpensive, but it comes at the expense of slower speed and sharing server space with many other websites. Unless you cannot afford anything else, this kind of hosting is not appropriate for e-commerce sites.
VPS stands for “Virtual Private Server”. Its resources are separated, removing many of the shared hosting issues.
Then, the highest tier is dedicated-hosting, giving you your own private, physical server. This doesn’t come cheap, of course. For e-commerce, both (VPS and Dedicated Hosting) of these hosting styles function well, but there’s a better solution.
Cloud hosting is a popular solution to a common problem for e-commerce sites: their server environment is increasingly outgrowing. Hosting on the cloud is a fully scalable option. At any time, you can add or delete services. And for entrepreneurs, too, it is cheap.
How to Choose Reliable PHP Hosting for Ecommerce Sites?
Every eCommerce hosting provider must offer the following features;
- Uncompromised Performance
- Bandwidth and File Storage
- Auto-Scaling
- Proactive Support
- Robust Security
- Automatic Backups
Uncompromised Performance
As an e-commerce business owner, finding a host that is fast and reliable should be your priority. If load times are longer than 3 seconds, 57 percent of customers will leave your platform, and 80 percent of them will never return. That’s a lot of opportunities wasted.
The issue with shared hosting is that it is sluggish and has regular downtime, which for any online store is unacceptable. As some hosts have poor infrastructure that can cause slowdowns or crashes, you also have to be cautious about who you choose.
Also Read: 8 Skills you need to be a kickass front end developer
Bandwidth and File Storage
Ecommerce sites take up lots of space for files and are often the type of website that typically attract the most traffic. If you want to end up paying hefty overage fees, you’re going to need a host that has enough resources for your site.
Images are a key component of the design of every site. In particular, e-commerce sites appear to rapidly eat up storage. Any product you upload is going to require many high-resolution files, and it’s easy to wonder where all your file space has gone when your store gets big enough.
Auto-Scaling
The traffic of an e-commerce store can be very unpredictable, unlike other forms of websites, which expand gradually and predictably over time. Holidays also create an extreme traffic boom, customers come out of nowhere, and growth appears to be abrupt and exponential.
You should look for two ways of scaling in a controlled e-commerce host: auto-scaling during sudden high-traffic times and scalable resources that expand with you.
Because of the surges of traffic that come with holiday times, auto-scaling is important for online stores. Your usual plan may suit you well during the year, but you’re going to run out of resources when the holidays roll around and shoppers come rushing in.
Proactive Support
Issues and mistakes are expected to occur in your new website. Your site could be down for hours if your host doesn’t have a strong support team that’s ready to help when you reach out. Consider an excellent web host with PHP and MySQL support for your website with a strong community presence. When there is an issue in a constructive way, support should be polite, supportive, quick, and willing to work with you.
A community of seasoned developers should be behind any support team. If the infrastructure and servers of the web host are well designed and encounter minimal downtime, it’s a positive indication that their development team will be able to support you with even the most unforeseen problems.
Robust Security
Because of the confidential data they protect, e-commerce sites are frequently targeted by hackers: credit card numbers, PayPal and bank passwords, and also the full names and addresses of users.
Hacking a poorly protected online store is very lucrative, and brand-new start-ups just don’t know how to keep the important data safe, so you need to protect your website.
It is up to you and your developers to protect your code, but several hacks happen due to weak security on the part of your web host. Server code vulnerabilities allow malicious actors to easily penetrate your website, gain access to user information, record passwords as they are sent through the server, or even place malware that targets users on your website.
Automatic Backups
I can’t emphasize enough how critical e-commerce sites are for backups. An utter must is automated data backups. In certain instances, regular, weekly, or even hourly: to secure your critical store and database files, a strong backup system needs to be in place.
Especially if you work in WordPress where it’s easy to unintentionally adjust sensitive settings, you could make a mistake that causes your website to go down or corrupt your database.
You’ll waste a lot of time and money trying to get things back to normal if you don’t have a recent backup. Maybe you’ll also end up losing everything. That’s why you need a built-in host with backups, so you can run your company with peace of mind.
Conclusion
The popular problem with many brand-new websites includes slow loading time, poor security, and lack of support because of a bad web host. It might seem cheap to start with a run-of-the-mill shared host, but the negative impact on your bottom line is not worth it.
You should choose the host that is ready to scale according to your business needs and provides top-notch service as well as affordable plans when searching for an e-commerce hosting provider.
Share your thoughts, what is the most important factor for you when it comes to hosting e-commerce?