Introduction
If you are running an eCommerce website, you already know it involves many tasks. The first goal is to discover the best hosting for eCommerce then register a domain name. Consequently, designing the site and applying SEO optimization for maintaining user-friendliness.
Let’s say you own a complete eCommerce website with all the features, but a robust hosting provider can make a huge difference. You need to ensure an exceptional customer experience through your eCommerce website. In addition, you should make your customer’s buying journey more smooth and hassle-free. Therefore, a hosting provider is essential to enable a website that works as fast as your customers’ preferences.
Many hosting providers are on the market, but you must select the right one for your business. That is because it is critical for maintaining the overall functionality of your website. This post will inform you of the necessity of the best hosting plan for your eCommerce business. Also, we will suggest how you can choose one for your site.
What Is An Ecommerce Hosting Plan?
Web hosting is a space on the web that you need to occupy to create your website. Let’s say eCommerce is a galaxy, and your website is a planet in that galaxy. To live on the planet, you don’t need the entire world; just a tiny portion of it will suffice, and that portion will serve as your web hosting. Without the space, you can place your house that pertains to being unable to run your website.
Hosting providers are the king of the land who owns the space on the planet. A good ruler provides a lot of benefits for civilians. Therefore, a good hosting provider will assist you in running your eCommerce website efficiently.
Importance of Best Hosting for Ecommerce
An excellent Hosting Plan will include and ensure these features for you:
A Website That Loads Rapidly
A good hosting provider will always ensure smooth accessibility for the users. Since the best hosting plan will include a proper infrastructure to support a website, it will work like a flash. This means it will load everything quickly on your website and ensure customer satisfaction.
To access a piece of land, what do you need? A good connection via land or any other medium such as water or air, right? The same goes for your website, and the hosting provider creates a proper route for the customers to access your website.
Nowadays, customers prefer a website that opens up any page in two or three seconds, and less is better. Otherwise, they move on to the next available option that works faster. Your website should meet the same standard and load faster than most of your competitor’s sites. Otherwise, you will lose potential prospects and stay behind in the race.
Renowned hosting providers in the market ensure that a website is loading fast with all the components. Therefore, check out the hosting providers we will mention later in this guide.
A Secured Website
A reasonable landowner or monarch would constantly safeguard his land’s security to prevent it from being overrun. As a result, the security of your eCommerce website will be ensured by an optimal hosting service. Consequently, you will never lose consumers since they will feel secure while making purchases.
Your hosting is also safeguarded alongside the website with a proper hosting provider. This implies that hackers won’t be able to steal any personal information or credit card information of your customers. Everything is safe from these nefarious characters!
Your website must include the following things to ensure security :
- HTTPS encryption that shows your Website is secure while searching via search engines.
- SSL certification that verifies the identity of a website and allows an encrypted and secured connection
If your website does not include any of the above elements, it’s a significant concern. Websites without SSL certificates and HTTPS encryption are considered unprotected or harmful sites. Also, a red signal appears on the left side of the web address on a browser.
Now think, will you buy products from a website that is not secured? The customers visiting your website will hesitate to purchase even exploring your website if it is not secured. Every piece of information on your website gets encrypted via SSL and HTTPS encryption. As a result, your data gets secured, and there is less chance to hack your private data.
How? The encryption method applied by HTTPS and SSL certificates changes the data provided by a user. Suppose you’ve provided your name “XYZ” in a form and “4E745” as the password in a website’s form. Hackers can easily get all this information if your website’s data is not encrypted by running a simple script.
On the other hand, when it’s secured with encryption, the data you’ve provided will be converted to something similar to “tklsnh%&t7”. Therefore, even if some get this information, it’s useless because the real data is only available for the site owner. So, choose a hosting provider who offers guaranteed security to your website via HTTPS and SSL certification.
Least Downtime in Your Site
You’ve entered a website to buy a product, and the purchase process is not working even if you did everything right. How would you feel? Of course, you will switch to a different website to purchase your preferred product.
When your hosting provider’s server is down or offline, your website won’t function properly. This period of server blackout is known as downtime. In a downtime, a website may go offline or become entirely dysfunctional. As a result, you risk losing potential consumers due to downtime at a critical point in the purchase process.
Choose a hosting provider that will keep your website online and functional with the highest uptime. Uptime is an ideal way to measure the best hosting for eCommerce. In this way, you can measure how long your website is up and running. Whether it’s slow or fast, keeping your website up and running is an essential thing you can do to keep your clients intrigued.
Expecting 100% uptime from hosting providers is unrealistic because technical issues can appear anytime. Server maintenance can also be the reason behind downtime, but it’s ignorable. Therefore, choose a hosting plan or provider that gives you 99% uptime and stay away from the rest.
What Should I Consider While Choosing a Hosting Plan
When it comes to choosing a hosting plan, you may become overwhelmed because there are many options. But you should not rush into deciding to consider one. Therefore, we’ve come up with some recommendations or, you can say, tips. These tips will assist you in selecting the best hosting plan for your eCommerce business.
Inspect Your Specific Business Requirements
While choosing the best hosting for eCommerce, do not just pick one from the list of the best providers. You must understand your business requirements, needs, and objectives before getting one.
If you are a beginner and require a simple website with basic functionalities, you can choose the hosted platforms such as Shopify or Bigcommerce.
You can easily run your eCommerce website that requires fewer functionalities on these platforms. However, when you need to include more functionalities on your website, go with these:
- WooCommerce (Good for Both basic and Advanced)
- Cloudways
- Magento
Now ask yourself what you need for your eCommerce website and assess the requirements by answering these basic questions –
- Are you willing to manage several online shops? That is because certain hosting providers allow you to do so from a single dashboard.
- How much budget have you proposed for your business and hosting provider? This will help you choose the best hosting for eCommerce under your budget.
- What is your expected traffic incoming ratio per month? This will help you assess the required resources for your eCommerce business. When you know that your customer base will snowball over time, simply select a provider that can sustain enough traffic load and other facilities.
- Does the hosting plan include enough security? You must choose a hosting plan that provides the SSL certificate and HTTPS encryption. For your convenience, you can select the one with the lowest rate.
Test The Speed of Your Hosting Providers
While choosing your best eCommerce hosting plan, never compromise the uptime. Uptime is a major concern you need to rely on while selecting the best hosting package. Your website must be available most of the time because it is related to your sales and revenue. You never know when the customer is visiting your website for purchase. Therefore, choose a plan that comes with minimum downtime.
Keep in mind that a faster hosting provider with less downtime (more than 99.5%) will be costly. But for the sake of your eCommerce business, you should think about the positive impact it will bring. Though there are many different tactics that you can apply to speed up your website, select a host with a fast server.
If you are running a small website generating small traffic, speed may not affect your business. But when your website grows, the traffic will increase, and you will also need the speed. As we mentioned earlier, your website should not take more than three seconds to load a page or element. Keep in mind that even a slight delay in loading time can bring a massive negative impact on your site.
Analyze the reviews available on the web about the hosting provider you’ve chosen. Also, Compare the packages with other hosting providers with the exact cost.
Measure the Security Features
Security is another crucial feature that is counted while selecting the best hosting for eCommerce. In fact, it is the most critical feature for eCommerce websites to save customer information, transactional information, and other information related to finance.
An ideal hosting provider will have a strong firewall and include anti-malware protection on the servers. They should always keep an eye on their servers for any form of infiltration; otherwise, you will not choose them.
Always seek a hosting company that offers an SSL certificate to secure the data on your website. Another feature to check for is IP deny, preventing unauthorized IPs from accessing your website. All of these security features are designed to deter and even disable hackers who may attempt to steal data from your website.
You should also look for the backup feature of the hosting plan. Since it is not guaranteed that you will never be hacked, you must have a backup server ready for that. Moreover, natural disasters can also destroy your data on the server as well. As a result, it’s preferable to have a backup server in case of an emergency, and an optimal hosting package will provide you with one.
Select a hosting plan that will back up your site data on a regular, weekly, or monthly basis. In this way, you can always be ready with your website, even if an uncertain event occurs.
Available Upgrade Options
If you just started your eCommerce business, shared web hosting will work for you as a starter. Moreover, it’s a cheap option that serves all your site’s needs, which is not yet extensive. But eventually, you will have to upgrade because your inventory and customer base will increase in time. With that, you will need more storage, speed, and other resources.
A hosting provider that starts with a smaller package and also includes larger spaces is the ideal option. A hosting plan that includes VPS hosting and dedicated hosting can help you make the switch to a new server.
Effective and rapid Customer Support
Customer service is frequently the deciding factor in whether or not a company succeeds. This is relevant to hosting companies since it distinguishes between the excellent and the poor. It’s more true when it comes to setting up an eCommerce website without any technical knowledge. Therefore, you need to research thoroughly and find out the support channel that has adequate features such as –
- Live Chat
- Messenger Chat
- Phone Support
- WhatsApp Support
Customers should always get every kind of solution whenever there is an issue with the server. Some hosts are available 24/7 to support their customers, while others aren’t. Depending on your business needs and availability schedule, select one according to your preference.
Furthermore, a Google search will reveal consumer evaluations and feedback regarding the quality of the support. But customer reviews are sometimes given based on a specific moment when the service was improper. Hence, you need to ask for a solution on your chosen hosting provider’s website and analyze their responses.
Compare the Prices More Effectively
While analyzing the price, go beyond the basic plans offered by a hosting provider. Most of the hosting providers offer additional features at cheap rates for the primary setup. But the plan will renew at a regular rate after the first month. Therefore, you should understand if you can afford other packages as well.
Quality comes with a price, and you should follow the same while choosing the best hosting for eCommerce. We recommend you select the best option by researching and comparing. Select the one that will meet your business requirement and provide all the features you need. Even if the package costs more but serves well, invest in it to get the best support.
Different Hosting Plans for ECommerce
Now that you know a lot about the hosting plan and the criteria to select one let’s move further. Generally, there are two types of hosting platforms for eCommerce. One is hosted and another is self-hosted. Let’s dive into learning more about these two hosting platforms.
Hosted Platform
Hosted platforms such as BigCommerce come with built-in features to build the website and all its elements. You will get all the website templates, UI and dashboards, plugins or applications, and hosting features to run your website.
You don’t need to rely on a third-party hosting provider to run their service because it is hosted already. It’s an ideal option for those with less technical knowledge in developing a website. You only need to pay for the service, and most of the part is already done for you. But the amount will vary depending on the service provider you are acquainted with.
Hosted Platform comes with the following features:
- Premade Hosting
- Verified SSL Certification & HTTPS encryptions
- Built-in apps and plugins
- Website building tools and templates
- Full SEO optimization
- Multi-channel selling and promotion options
- Inventory management system
- Automated cart recovery option
In hosted platforms, you can focus more on business activities, which means fewer activities for building a website or selecting a hosting provider. But hosted platforms are costly due to all-in-one features in them.
When your store becomes large with more inventory and customers, it will require more features. The monthly payment will also increase with the auto-updated features and benefits. Moreover, you will get a limited window for customization because it’s limited inside the platform. Most importantly, the process is complex if you want to switch to another platform.
Some popular eCommerce platforms that are Hosted:
- Shopify
- Bigcommerce
- Volusion
- Wix-online store builder
Self-hosted Platforms
Self-hosted platforms offer better website-building capabilities, but they won’t offer a built-in hosting plan. You have to find a third-party hosting provider or the best hosting for eCommerce by yourself. Next, you have to launch the website under your chosen hosting provider.
You will have to craft the infrastructure and install the plugins or extensions in a self-hosted platform. As a result, you will get a full-on website for eCommerce that operates smoothly. You also get the opportunity to customize a theme and plugins if you have enough technical knowledge.
You don’t need to build everything on your own because there are thousands of themes and plugins to cater to your needs. But you have to know how to apply those themes and plugins to your business correctly. In addition, you have to have a little technical expertise to combine all the features perfectly.
Self-hosted platforms are cheaper, and you can build your website as you imagine. This is one of the main reasons behind the popularity of self-hosted platforms among users. If you are the one who needs more and more features in your store to blend with the trends, a self-hosted platform is your thing. But as a beginner, you can surely start with hosted platforms out there.
Another great thing about the self-hosted platform is the product feed. You can transfer all your store’s product information from your website to marketing channels via product feed. This feature is not that easy while using hosted platforms. Some great plugins such as CTX Feed are there to enable this feature. That is why the self-hosted platform is getting more and more credible.
These are Some popular self-hosted eCommerce platforms:
- WooCommerce
- PrestaShop
- Magento
Hosting Providers for Self-hosted Platforms
Let’s introduce you to one of the latest hosting providers for self-hosted platforms- MilesWeb. It is indeed one of the best hostings for eCommerce websites. While most of the hosting providers serve you a paid domain name, they are giving it for free.
With this provider, you can install WordPress with one click, which means it will be super easy for anyone. Most importantly, you will always get amazing customer support from MilesWeb. In addition, they always offer discounts or deals that blend with every type of budget.
Final Words
To choose the best hosting for eCommerce, all you need to do is compare and analyze. Make sure that there is no hidden charge for any major services such as server upgrade or email hosting.
At this point, you’ve already learned the aspects that you should look into while choosing the best eCommerce hosting provider. We hope it will surely assist you in finding the best service provider to run your eCommerce business efficiently.
