ECommerce hosting pertains to a web hosting platform that serves an electronic commerce website, which includes features such as payment processing services, security initiatives, SSL, shopping cart software, and more. E-commerce hosting businesses usually manage all the technical facets of commercial website development and maintenance for their clients. E-commerce hosting covers a wide array of solutions and applications that assist businesses with selling their products on the World Wide Web.
If you’re thinking of starting a website and selling products online, you might wonder what the best tools are to get started. After all, there are plenty of different options available. You could build your own website from scratch, for example, or find a pre-built template that doesn’t require coding experience. Perhaps you even know someone with excellent web design to build you one. But the best choice is to find and choose a trusted host for your eCommerce. What is the benefit of this and why do you need it? Let’s find out.
What Are The Benefits Of ECommerce Hosting?
Although you might encounter many affordable plans that meet some of your criteria, it’s essential to do some research before committing. You should also consider a web host that can grow with you. You can visit: www.runhost.com to see what plans we offer that fit your business.
You can change hosts at any time, but migrating your site can be a hassle for you and your customers. It’s a better idea to choose the best web host upfront so that you can familiarize yourself with them as you scale up.
- Encryption– Security should be one of your top concerns when comparing web hosting companies. However, a single factor won’t make one eCommerce host better than another. Here’s a list to help you: Firewalls, SSL certificates, DDoS protection, Spam filters, Domain name privacy, and Virus protection. Any kind of fraud involving your website could put your shop and reputation at risk. A secure hosted eCommerce platform should offer a variety of safeguards, including the ones in the list above, to give you peace of mind.
- PCI Compliance– or Payment card industry compliance refers to the technical and operational standards that businesses follow to secure and protect credit card data provided by cardholders and transmitted through card processing transactions. What is the benefit of this? This should be offered by any eCommerce web host. A breach could be catastrophic when dealing with an enormous amount of personal data, including credit card numbers. If you think that this won’t happen to you, think again. Up to 90% of the logins to eCommerce websites may be fraudulent. Approximately 20% of people who learn about a breach stop shopping at a particular retailer altogether. About 30% stopped purchasing from that company temporarily.
- File sizes– If you have an online store, you probably have an image-heavy website. With so many files stored on your site, you don’t want customers to experience slow load times. Some of the biggest culprits that cause site delays are videos, high-resolution photos, and PDFs. Your hosting plan needs enough bandwidth to support all of your files. The best hosting platform will also guide you toward creating the best image sizes to optimize your site.
- Backups– Your online shop might be easy to build and manage, but what happens when things go wrong? If your website gets hacked or doesn’t work properly after an update, a backup could save your hide. Without an easy way to back up your site, you could lose customer, order, and product data. You should back up as much data as possible regularly; daily backups aren’t out-of-the-question, hosting plans at RunHost have backup plans of your choice. The backups are stored on a separate server from your website and are easy to access if you need to restore your site. If you use our hosting solution, backup is fully managed by us and its entire platform, you don’t have to do it individually and rest your mind peacefully.
- Account Limitations– You probably want to get the most bang for your buck from your web hosting platform. When doing your research, find out what you get with each plan. Learn whether or not you can upgrade if you need more scalability options. Make sure you know exactly what each package includes. Here are some account limitations that you might encounter when you’re comparing eCommerce hosting plans: Free eCommerce software that requires you to pay separately for SSL certificates or hosting, Limited file storage, and Only a few free website templates; you might have to pay extra for the most desirable ones, Additional charges if you don’t use the hosting service’s payment processors, Limits on sales volumes, No access to customer service representatives, Hefty overage fees if you exceed the bandwidth limits, and Difficulty customizing your website without developer knowledge.
Why You Need ECommerce Hosting?
Your website content files need to be stored somewhere. You need eCommerce hosting for you to easily handle your business and to improve customer experience on your site. Here are the 3 reasons:
- Customers will leave a slow site. Today, 47% of consumers expect a page load speed of two seconds or less. Aside from the customer experience, Google uses site speed as a ranking factor. That’s because search engines take longer to produce results if they can’t discover and index websites quickly. The best eCommerce hosting company like RunHost will make sure that it can manage the volume you expect. This includes traffic spikes and other factors that can interfere with performance, such as caching and Content Delivery Networks.
- Customers won’t be able to access vulnerable sites. Although anyone can start an eCommerce site, a business needs to implement the proper security measures before customers can make purchases. If your site isn’t encrypted with HTTPS, your site will be identified as “not secure” when your audience is using Chrome. Seeing this in the URL bar doesn’t boost consumer confidence in your brand. Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificates are small files stored on a server that encrypt the data transferred between your computer and a website’s server. They are ideal for securing data transfer, and credit card transactions, and are even being used to secure the browsing of various social media websites. While some eCommerce website owners are afraid that adding an SSL certificate is expensive or complicated, a good web host like RunHost offers encryption as part of their package. Plus, keeping your security updated can be a full-time job and can be a hassle for you, that’s why you need a hosting plan for your business.
- You can’t afford downtime. If your customers can’t access your site, they can’t buy. The amount of revenue lost during one hour of downtime depends on the time of day, your sales volume, traffic, and the number of people impacted. If this happens frequently enough, you’ll get a bad reputation. In fact, downtime could even sink your business. So getting a hosting plan to minimize/cut out the risk. Example in RunHost offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee, which means they always make sure your site will not experience any unplanned or unscheduled downtime for they will pay a service fee if this happened. Remember, unplanned downtime is more of a threat because it can take longer to remediate.
Conclusion
When you rely on your website to deliver your income, you need to start by selecting the right host. It is already said above the importance and benefit of eCommerce hosting, there are many to choose from and you can start with RunHost. Just estimate your sales volume, traffic, site size, and budget then choose the best plan. On that note, you should check out our 100% managed VPS cloud hosting plan: we offer a variety of plans that will make getting an eCommerce site off the ground a breeze and scale as you grow. Save time, and costs and maximize site performance with eCommerce hosting.
