Picking the right host to host your Growing Ecommerce Store
Hosting providers are the most crucial website suppliers. It's a factor that can either make or break you particularly for big-scale retailers that feature many products and do a lot of business online.
In selecting a hosting provider It should come down to more than a simple cost comparison. If your shop online is at the core of your business, you want to have the best support possible.
How big is huge?
Most online stores begin small, with basic, limited hosting packages with shared servers. When should you start considering the possibility of moving to more sophisticated hosting options that support massive enterprise?
Consider upgrading your hosting if you're seeing:
- An abundance of regular traffic. A good guideline for a large-scale shop is more than 100,000 per month, however lower levels of traffic can create problems as well. If your site is experiencing slow loading pages, occasional site outages, or issues with transactions not taking too long to complete, it's time to update.
- Many products and/or clients. A lot of hosting that is cheap has an limit on storage space, however, if you're hosting thousands of products or variations together with images, you might find yourself facing extra storage costs from the hosting company. Storage of data for large amounts of customer accounts can cause similar issues.
- Outages on websites during high traffic. Spikes in traffic are one of the biggest reasons to consider a hosting upgrade. You should feel confident that you can promote a big sale at the busiest time of the year and have your hosting company quietly manage it without causing any disruption to the user experience of your website.
Must-have hosting features
If you're looking at the higher levels of hosting, make this list of essential features handy when comparing businesses. If you're searching for an eCommerce hosting expert who understands the value of each of these functions and has it in their packages.
and WordPress specialization
Additionally, you should look for hosts that actively participate in and are supportive of the WordPress open source environment. Companies that devote personnel time and resources the development of WordPress its core as well as the testing of the features they offer are more likely to be experts in this field, and also to be aware of any potential problems that may arise.
Included backups
In the case of the internet-based stores, data is king. Your orders, inventory numbers customer accounts, orders, and the total number of sales are crucial. No matter how reliable your hosting provider is, interruptions do happen, and you'll feel more secure knowing that your site is receiving regularly scheduled backups.
Unlimited bandwidth as well as storage space
The last thing you want your clients to experience is a negative gateway error when trying to access your website. The "white white screens" usually result from overwhelmed servers that cannot handle the traffic on your website. This causes the requests to fail.
At the same time it is important to ensure you have all the space needed to keep your product information, order data, as well as customer profiles.
Choose a package with unlimited bandwidth and storage capacity. You should consider cloud hosting or dedicated that means you won't compete for resources against other websites hosting on the same server. You will scale easily as required.
Expertly designed security configuration
An excellent hosting service will be open about their security measures for websites, and will make sure their servers are properly configured with up-to-date software for maximum safety. They must be able to address any concerns you may have regarding security, and they should enjoy a great reputation for maintaining up-time and discouraging hackers.
As a minimum, your hosting company is required to make use of PCI (Payment Card Industry) compatible servers that ensure your customer data absolutely secure, and include an SSL certificate to ensure that every web-related communication is encrypted and secure.
Protection against spikes in traffic
Imagine working hard to create buzz about a new product launch, or an event that is a sale, such as Black Friday. But, at the time of the big moment your website goes down because of the tsunami of traffic that is flooding in which results in a disgruntled client base as well as a substantial loss of sales and income.
If you need to support such a surge in sales, it's essential to choose a hosting provider with the capacity to meet the demands. Consider cloud hosting as your option, as it easily grows to accommodate the increased demand on the shop.
An international perspective on shopping at international stores
If your store does business worldwide, then you'll want a hosting service that supports the Content Delivery Network (CDN). The most advanced hosting plans will come with an CDN that copies the website's data to servers all over the globe and provides a cached version of pages to international customers. It results in quicker access to your website around the globe, and better performance and support for your customers.
Free premium plugins
Additionally, certain premium hosting plans will also come with premium plugins such as Jetpack Complete with additional security, one-click backup protection as well as advanced speed options. If you're looking at different hosting plans for a large-scale shop having access to premium plugins can be the factor that tips the scales.
The built-in staging space
If you operate a shop that's operating round every minute, you cannot be able to always shut it down for update software, much less completely revamps. Don't expose your earnings when you run updates while in live mode.
A good host should provide access to staging areas. Create a duplicate website with just one click. Then, run your updates or make your required design changes and check, test, try. Once you're satisfied, moving your changes back to the live website should be an easy process.
Professional and 24/7 assistance
Look for a company with positive reviews from customers and an easy way to contact a person by phone, email or live chat. It is important to know that the host will have you covered at any time that you're online. If you're talking about ecommerce, that's all the time, every day.
There's no question that quality hosting is more expensive. But the price of discount hosting can be lost sales, stressful website outages and security problems, all of which stores simply can't afford. Hosting experts with you to accommodate a wide range of products, sales, and surges in traffic with ease is well worth the cost to safeguard your biggest assets and online image.