Having a visually good website is just half the way. It will attract visitors but they will eventually leave if your website doesn’t offer a smooth experience.
80% of the visitors who experience slow page load will never come back.
Therefore, choosing the best eCommerce hosting becomes crucial. Even if it’s not directly visible to your customers, the impact will be felt.
Top 3 criteria for choosing an eCommerce Host
Hosting is a long term investment. What works right now may not work in the future. Have a long-term vision while choosing an eCommerce host because a wrong decision can cost you time, money, and efforts.
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Expected Traffic
How much traffic do you expect on your site?
- If you’re just starting out, your store can work with an optimized stack with basic configuration.
- If you’re growing rapidly, your eCommerce site will require enough resources to handle the spikes in traffic.
- Will your website be able to handle the traffic when you run a campaign?
Therefore, it is always smart to go with a host that provides flexibility to handle traffic surge, especially during festive seasons without downtime. Cloud hosting is one of the best solutions for eCommerce stores as it is cost-effective and offers scalability.
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Budget
People have budgets from $10 to $1000 to host websites. One of the most common mistakes eCommerce store owners do is choose the cheapest option. Don’t fall for the $3 price tag. You will have to look for add-on services like monitoring & maintenance from somewhere else. This won’t be cost-effective and will cost you way higher than planned.
Before you decide onto an eCommerce host, decide the following cost:
- Monthly hosting
- Web designing
- Security
- Maintenance
- License
- App creation
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Level of technical expertise
If you have the knowledge and time to take care of your website, then you can even go for a self-managed host. But if you are looking to invest your time in core business activities, consider going for a fully-managed hosting. The premium packages will include all the features necessary for your store.
4 Things to Consider While Choosing a Host for Your Store
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Security
Most of the stores get compromised due to security loopholes.
“Juniper Research estimates that the cost of data breaches will increase to $2.1 trillion globally by 2019”
It is important to go for a managed hosting that will take care of the contingencies. Compare the hosting options, send them a message, see how fast they respond, talk to their clients if possible. Deciding on a host for your eCommerce website is a big deal!
An ideal hosting company should offer:
- Web Application Firewalls
- DDoS Protection
- SSL
- Proactive Monitoring
- 24*7 Support
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Guaranteed Uptime
Uptime is the amount of time when the site is accessible to the visitors. Higher the uptime, the more likely users are to shop from your store. Many web hosts provide an uptime of 99.8% per year. Anything lower than this would mean a serious business loss to you.
Even if you go for the best hosting provider offering 99.9% uptime, you still have to deal with 50 minutes of downtime per month. To know better, discuss with them about the data center they collocated in.
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Automated Backups
Being optimistic takes you a long way but over-optimism will drop you hard for a reality check. Backups are absolutely necessary when it comes to an eCommerce website. If backups won’t be there, you could lose:
- Product listings
- Client details
- Order history
And other important website details.
Things can go wrong anytime anywhere. If you’re online, you’re at risk of being attacked by thousands of attackers. Always go for a web host who knows the importance of backups, backs up your data as regularly as possible, and keeps a copy of it for a longer duration.
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Flexibility
When you’re researching for web hosting options make sure you’re getting a cost-effective and scalable solution.
The biggest deceit in web hosting is showing a lower price and charging hefty once the user is stuck. Find out what all you are getting with each plan. What happens when you upgrade later? How much do you pay after the offer period is over? Is there a lock-in period? Make sure you exactly what each package includes.
Some of the limitations you might see:
- Paying for SSL certificates separately
- Limited file storage
- Paying extra for backups
- No customer service representative
- Minimum management in the name of managed hosting
- Poor reporting of the website
Levels of Hosting
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Fully-Managed
When you go for a fully-managed hosting provider, you don’t have to worry about the security or uptime of the website. Benefits of a fully managed host:
- Premium technical support
- 24*7 website monitoring so that when there is an issue, it gets resolved before you face any business loss
- Better security with WAF (Web Application Firewall), SSL certificates, PCI compliance, DDoS protection, etc
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Self-Managed
Choose a self-managed hosting only when you have technical knowledge and time to focus on the server-side of your store. You can use automatic management tools like Zabbix, ManageEngine, etc for better website management.
Questions to Ask Your Host
Q1. How will you cope up if the website goes down and I have a campaign running?
Q2. What do you offer for my visitor’s security?
Q3. Will my website load faster?
Most importantly,
Getting a trusted and reliable web hosting for your eCommerce store would be easier if you’d see it as a long-term investment. If you fall for the price tag, you’d regret it later!
Weigh the options you have, see what you need the most – is it technical support, scalability, better security and then decide.
