What is an E-commerce Hosting and How to Select One?

Jul 31, 2023

The choice of your hosting package is one of the trickiest issues to address when building an online store or a website for a catalogue. Web hosts for e-commerce offer services to store (or host) your website. It is comparable to leasing a virtual location for your internet store. For your website to function properly, for you to maintain high traffic, for your customers to be satisfied, and for you to obtain strong brand positioning, you must select the appropriate hosting package and adapt it to your needs as your shop or catalogue grows.  If a website takes too long to load or is difficult to navigate, up to 80% of internet users will never return. To prevent more issues in the future, make sure you have high-quality hosting that is appropriate for the style of your store or e-commerce platform.

E-commerce Hosting Types

Prior to anything else, we must make a distinction between two major hosting categories:

Self-managed:

You are in charge of maintaining your hosting and setting up a plan with this type of hosting. This is normally a less expensive option, but it requires a dedicated systems administrator and a highly skilled technical team of professionals.

Managed:

With this sort of hosting, the hosting company also takes care of your site's installation, configuration, upkeep, and monitoring of its performance and the security precautions required on a daily basis for it. This one is the most suggested option for an e-commerce site because it will save you time.

Shared Hosting

For online stores and websites, this is the most well-liked and cheap hosting option. It comprises of a server that makes storage space available to several websites in portions. As a result, you would be paying a little storage fee on that server. The difficulty with this sort of hosting is that you actually share an enormous amount of space and an IP address with many other websites, which can slow things down.

Advantages:

It costs a lot less money.
Configuring it is simple.
It is possible to administer multiple websites at once and it supports multi-domain.

Disadvantages:

You and the other websites on that server have the same IP address.
You share it with other people; therefore, the space is constrained.
The risk of loading issues and mistakes is higher.
It can have a bad impact on SEO.

Dedicated Hosting

For a completely safe and high-performing e-commerce site, this is the most expensive option, but it is also the one that is most recommended. You have more control over speed, storage, and privacy with dedicated hosting because you are renting out personal space for yourself. If your online store is housed on an e-commerce platform or content management system (CMS) like Magento or Shopify, where you connect numerous pieces of product data, this is also the way that is most frequently advised.

Virtual Privet Servers (VPS)

You also get server space with VPS hosting, the size of which depends on how many gigabytes you want to purchase. VPS hosting is private and operates independently, in contrast to shared hosting.

How to Pick the Ideal Hosting for Your Online Store?

It's important to consider more than simply your budget and your technical team's level of preparedness when selecting your hosting plan. In order to choose the finest hosting option for your e-commerce site, consider all of the following:

Features

Each provider may provide various bundles, even within the same hosting category, depending on the size of your online store or catalogue.
Bandwidth: The number of visitors to your website will rely on how quickly your page loads. You'll need to transfer more or less information depending on how many visitors you have each day. Be cautious because some providers might charge you more if you use more bandwidth than you were supposed to.

Domains: Make sure your plan allows you to host many websites if that is what you want to do. For producers or retailers who manage multiple brands or different storefronts, this is a handy choice.

Space: A lot of product photographs are served up on an e-commerce page, and if those images are high resolution, even more space is required. You're going to require somewhere between 1 and 4 gigabytes of hosting, depending on how many photographs your catalogue contains. As opposed to saving your product data and photographs, which you might easily do with a PIM system (Product Information Management).

Performance and Speed

As we've already discussed, the essence of good hosting is that it ensures rapid website loading. The majority of web users don't browse for more than three seconds on each page, which makes it risky to lose visitors. Additionally, Google gives faster-loading websites more credit. Any loading or speed issues are immediately alerted to you by performance alerts in a decent hosting plan, allowing you to address them as soon as feasible.

Other factors that affect your e-commerce site's speed include:

Using the most recent generation of hard drives, known as solid state drives (SSD), ensures faster performance.
Having a CDN (Content Delivery Network) speeds up loading. This red has various local storage locations to save your server material locally.
RAM: Performance improves as RAM memory increases.
Location of the hosting server: It is best if your server is located in the same nation as the majority of your website's visitors.

Security

A further fundamental pillar of your hosting is having the best security measures in place to prevent vulnerabilities. If a person tries to access your website and receives a security alert, you can be sure that they will never return. Having the required security measures guarantees that hackers, malware, spyware, spam, and other issues that harm your performance, reputation, and SEO won't target your store or website.

So, be certain the following is part of your hosting plan:

You might need to make backup copies on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Having backups of your data and pages is essential to preventing losses or unintended modifications that cannot be undone.
The primary internet security seal is the SSL certificate. This enables you to utilize "https" in your site address and encrypt data, providing the highest level of security for browsing and particularly for making payments online. Antivirus software, firewalls, DDoS defence, and spam filters.

Technical Assistance

Your hosting will undoubtedly cause you a little trouble at some point, regardless of how fantastic it is. Because problems and malfunctions can occur at any moment of the day, it is crucial to make sure that it contains a technical support service, preferably one that is available 24/7.

Check to discover if your hosting provider gives help in your language and if you can reach them by phone or chat for more individualized preferences.

Customization

You'll need a hosting package that is expandable and can be customized in terms of the CMS modules you may need because your online store or e-commerce business will undoubtedly develop over time. If engineers will be required to optimize the hosting plan for the platform you require (WordPress, Ubuntu, HTTP/2, etc.), pick a plan that won't be a hassle to expand in terms of capacity and features if you need to do so in the future.

You could need a web hosting plan that specializes in dealing with Shopify, Magento, or WooCommerce because certain CMS systems require more complex integration.