E-commerce has grown massively in the last couple of years. Gone are the days when we would associate the idea of e-commerce with a few giant companies, such as Amazon, Flipkart or Snapdeal. Owing to the shift in consumer shopping habits, an increasing number of small, medium and large businesses are now joining the e-commerce space to maximize their revenue and profit margin.
Hosting an e-commerce website is different from hosting any ordinary website. While fundamental features such as payment processing services and shopping cart software are crucial, special attention should be given to SSL and other security initiatives. Therefore, you need to be extra careful while choosing your SSL certificate provider.
Top Considerations In Choosing The Best Hosting Provider for Ecommerce Businesses
Encryption
One of the biggest things that might concern you is the security of your website. There are several security features such as firewalls, DDoS protection, spam filters, SSL certificates, domain name privacy, virus protection and more. Of course, the pricing is based on the number of features you get with your monthly or annual plans.
Hacking is on the rise. Today, unsecured websites can be hacked or made malicious merely by injecting code. Once malware lands on a website, it can then steal valuable and sensitive information, such as internet banking passwords or credit card details of your visitors. As an eCommerce store owner, you ought to keep hackers at bay as fraudulent activities associated with the use of your website will not only put your business reputation at stake but also attract legal fines or sanctions.
PCI compliance
Payment card industry (PCI) compliance implies the operational and technical standards followed by businesses in order to provide data security and protection to their customers. Data breaches could be highly cataclysmic, and given the fact that incidents of important data leakage are quite common in the present world, complying with the standards of PCI is an absolute no-brainer.
Surprisingly, the percentage of logins exposed to fraudulent activities can be as high as 90%. Modern consumers are quite cognizant, and they disqualify the idea of shopping from a website that has the slightest possibility of a scam or a potential fraud.
Top e-commerce hosting providers generally comply with PCI standards that secure and encrypt customer information. And if you find that your provider does not offer you such a safety commitment, then it might be a red flag. By the way, you are wise enough to make your decision.
Bandwidth Considerations
An online store typically demands an image-heavy website, which essentially means that a plethora of files needs to be stored and accessed. Often times, such bombardment of information in the form of high-resolution photos, videos, and PDFs results in slower load time. So, you need to do an ecommerce website hosting comparison to come up with a plan that offers sufficient bandwidth to support such heavy data. What’s more, you can expect guidance and support to be able to create the best image sizes for site optimization.
Backups
Although creating and managing a shopping cart website is not an uphill task in itself, things can go wrong if your website stops working after an update or a hacking attempt. What shields your customer, order and product data is a backup. Therefore, regularly backing up your site data is quintessential. Not just that, it is important to ensure that your backups should be stored on a different server and are easy to access as and when required. Some hosting solutions back up their entire platform, in which case there isn’t any need to back it up independently.
Functionalities & Limitations
It is quite obvious that you would like to give substantial weightage to the functionalities and limitations that come with your e-commerce hosting plan in the process of finding your best gig. It’s undeniably helpful to learn in advance about the scope of upgradation as and when you like to scale your business to the next level. Having said that, you must ensure you know what each package offers.
All things considered, you might encounter the following account limitations when you are making objective comparisons in choosing the best web hosting for your site:
- Extra charges for SSL certificates
- Limited free templates
- Extra charges if using the payment processing system provided by the hosting provider.
- Restricted sales volumes
- Penalty/fees on exceeding the prescribed bandwidth limits.
- No customer support
- Poor analytics
- Complexities in site customization
Conclusion
Since different web hosting companies offer varying degrees of functionalities and capabilities, it is imperative that you choose the best e-commerce hosting that suits your budget and, more importantly, your website needs. You should not get lured by exciting offers such as bargain coupon codes or fire sale discounts. Although you can cancel your hosting plan anytime, remember that migrating your site is not child’s play. Therefore, it is always a good idea to do your research before starting any commitment.
0 Comments
Do not enter any spam links in the comment box.