Picking the right host to host Your Growing Ecommerce Store
The hosting company you choose to work with is the most crucial site partners. It could determine your success or failure in the case of large-scale businesses with a variety of products. They also conduct a large amount of business on the internet.
When choosing your host, it should come down to much more than just a cost comparison. If you have an online store that is at the core of your enterprise, you want to have the best assistance you can receive.
How big is huge?
Many online stores start modestly, using basic and limited hosting packages using shared servers. When should you start considering an upgrade to more powerful hosting that can support a large enterprise?
Consider upgrading your hosting if you're seeing:
- The high amount of traffic that is regular. A good guideline for large-scale shops is greater than 100,000 monthly visits, but less traffic may result in problems. If you're seeing slow-loading pages and occasional website outages or issues with transactions not being delayed, you should consider upgrading your website.
- Many products and/or clients. A lot of hosting that is cheap has an limit on storage space, and if you have many thousands of variants or products and photos, you may encounter additional storage fees from the hosting company. Storing information for large volumes of customers' accounts could cause similar issues.
- Website outages when there is a spike in traffic. Spikes in traffic are one of the biggest reasons for considering a web hosting upgrade. It is important to be confident that you can promote a big sales during the busiest times of the year, and let your hosting provider quietly handle it with no impact to the user experience of your website.
Hosting features that you must have
If it's time to look at a higher level of hosting, keep this checklist of key characteristics in mind while comparing different businesses. If you're searching for an eCommerce hosting professional who is aware of the importance of each one of these features and includes it in their packages.
and WordPress with a specialization
As a bonus, look for hosts that actively participate in and are supportive of the WordPress open source environment. Companies that devote their staff and resources to the creation of WordPress core and testing of the functions are likely to be experts in this field, and also to be aware of any potential difficulties that develop.
Included backups
When it comes to online shops, data is king. The numbers of your inventory, orders, customer accounts, as well as total sales figures are vital. Whatever your hosting service is, downtimes are bound to happen. You can feel more secure knowing that your website is getting periodic backups that are automatic and regular.
Unlimited bandwidth as well as storage space
The last thing you want your visitors to see is a bad gateway error if they try to load your website. This "white screen of death" usually result from overwhelmed servers that cannot cope with the load on your site, causing delays in requests.
However, you need to know you've got the space required to store the information about your products, orders data, as well as customer profiles.
Choose a package with unlimited bandwidth and storage space. Consider dedicated or cloud hosting that means you don't have to compete for resources with other sites hosting on the same server. You will scale easily as required.
Expertly designed security configuration
A reputable hosting provider will be open about their security protections for your website, and will make sure they have their servers set up with the latest software available for optimal safety. They ought to be able address any concerns you may have regarding security, and they should are well-known in ensuring up-time, and deterring hackers.
In the minimal, the hosting service should utilize PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliant servers that keep your customer data absolutely secure, and include an SSL certificate that ensures every web-related communication is encrypted and secured.
Safety from traffic spikes
Imagine that you've put in a lot of effort to generate buzz for an upcoming product launch or a sales event like Black Friday. And then, just when it comes time for the big moment the site goes down because of the tsunami of incoming traffic and creates a unhappy customer base and a significant decrease in revenue and sales.
If you're required to manage the surge in sales, it's essential to have a host with the capacity to meet the demands. Consider cloud hosting as your solution; it seamlessly expands to handle the load on your store.
Global perspective for international shops
If your business operates globally, then you'll require a hosting service that supports an Content Delivery Network (CDN). More advanced hosting packages will include a CDN, which copies the website's data to servers all over the globe and provides an archived version of the websites to customers from all over the world. This results in faster access to your website around the globe, with better performance and assistance for your clients.
Premium plugins for free.
As a bonus, some high-level hosting packages will contain premium plugins, such as Jetpack Complete with additional security, one-click backups as well as advanced speed options. If you're considering various hosting options to run a big-scale business and you have access to premium plugins can be the factor that tips the scales.
An integrated staging area
If you run a bustling business that is active round the clock, you can't be able to always shut it down for software updates or even full redesigns. You don't want to expose your earnings when you run updates in a live environment.
A good host should provide access to staging environments. Make a duplicate of your site in just one click. Then, run the updates, or make any necessary design adjustments and then test, test, check. When you're ready, pushing your changes back to the live website should be straightforward.
Professional support, 24 hours a day
Look for a company with positive reviews from customers and an easy way to contact a person by phone, email or live chat. You want assurance that the host will have you covered at any time that your online store is open. If you're talking about ecommerce, that's constantly, each and every day.
It's obvious that high-quality hosting costs more. However, the cost of discount hosting could be the loss of profits, disorganized website interruptions and security problems that stores simply can't afford. The benefit of having experts in hosting with you to handle a variety of items or sales as well as the peaks in traffic easily is worth the price for the protection of your best business asset and your online image.