Selecting the Ideal Hosting Solution for your Ecommerce Store

We’re past the days when the person only needed to consider disk storage and bandwidth when selecting the right web hosting service. Nowadays, with so many web hosting services to select from, you might think to go with the first one you see. Although you may find yourself lucky and have no problems with your selection whatsoever, this isn’t a bet anyone should be willing to take.

You will need to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the hosting provider and the benefits available when you choosing the right host for your ecommerce store. Simultaneously, you should understand that various hosting service providers suit different kinds of eCommerce stores.

Self-hosted vs Fully hosted

Fully hosted solutions maintain your store data on their cloud. You won’t have to set up your own server since they’re storing the data for you. On the other hand, with a self-hosted solution, your company is responsible for web hosting. That means you’ll have to set up and maintain an online server – typically in the cloud – and store files and data.

Fully hosted solutions are better known as SaaS products – software as a service – and some common examples for ecommerce include:

• BigCommerce
• Shopify

While self-hosted platforms include:

• Magento
• WooCommerce

Uptime

Since no web hosting can truthfully guarantee they will be online 100 percent of the time, many web hosting solutions boast about 99.9% uptime. Although usually good enough, it’s crucial to note that any downtime has a negative impact on your eCommerce revenue. The difference between 99.9% uptime and 99.99% uptime is a half an hour per average month, which shouldn’t be neglected in an industry like eCommerce – particularly at peak traffic times when issues are more likely to happen.

According to Gartner, the average cost of network downtime is around $5,500 per minute – which is around $280,000 per hour. This number goes even higher when online stores are in question. Consider that several times a year, and you’re losing a rather large amount of possible revenue.

But it’s even bigger – a single poor customer service experience can do far more damage to your branding. When there is a lot of customers who are unable to view a product or complete their order because of the downtime, you’ll be dealing with much more than lost profits.

Customer service

How effective and fast is the web host’s support for technical problems? Technical support is especially important for any ecommerce store since the sheer amount of people visiting your online shop will cause more issues than when running an unknown blog site.

Try to select a host that offers live technical support for C-panel to their clients 24/7 likeBluefishhosting in Australia or international GoDaddy, and also find those with chat support, as well as social media visibility as opposed to support tickets and emails. Prioritize providers with an in-house customer support department. They should have a better grasp of the hosting operations when compared to outsourced customer support service.

The design

Fully hosted ecommerce providers listed above offer a plethora of options for “themes” or pre-made designs to get your website rolling. If you wish to customize the design of your online shop you can do that on a fully hosted solutions just as easily as you can on a self-hosted solution. 

For self-hosted solutions, the customization of the design of your store requires the knowledge of front-end programming – HTML, CSS, PHP, and some JavaScript. Monthly maintenance of your products in your ecommerce store can be achieved with either a fully or self-hosted solution with no issues assuming everything was initially created correctly.

Site Speed

Website speed not only plays a major part in building a positive user experience, but it also influences where the search engines decide to rank your website. While it is only one factor among hundreds that Google utilizes to decide about the ranking of your website, it may be one of the most dominant there.

Search engines have their own end-users, and in order to provide them with the best possible experience, they want to be sure they are sending them to sites that not only have quality content but also don’t irritatingly lag.

How quickly your site loads depend on a multitude of factors, such as the type of files you have, their overall size, your web host, etc.

If you’re considering to run and consistently grow your website into the foreseeable future, try adopting a comprehensive approach to analyzing web hosting providers by looking at all of the factors needed for optimal functionality of your website.

from Feedster https://www.feedster.com/ecommerce/selecting-the-ideal-hosting-solution-for-your-ecommerce-store/