Selecting a powerful host for the Growing Ecommerce Store
Hosting providers are one of your most important site suppliers. It could be the difference between success and failure particularly for big-scale retailers with a variety of products. They also run a significant amount of business on the internet.
When choosing your host It should come down to more than just a cost comparison. If you have an online store that is the heart of your business, you want to have the best service you can get.
What size is large?
Most online stores begin modestly, using basic and limited hosting packages using shared servers. When should you start considering a move to more advanced hosting that can support a massive enterprise?
Consider upgrading your hosting if you're seeing:
- A high volume of traffic that is regular. A good guideline for a large-scale shop is greater than 100,000 monthly visits. However, less traffic may cause problems too. If your site is experiencing slow loading pages, occasional site outages, or problems with transactions taking too long to complete, you should consider upgrading your website.
- Many products and/or clients. A lot of hosting that is cheap has an limit on storage space, however, if you're hosting hundreds of variations or products together with pictures, you could encounter additional storage costs from your hosting company. Storing information for large volumes of customer accounts can cause similar problems.
- Website outages when there is a spike in traffic. Spikes in traffic are one major motives to think about a upgrading your hosting. You should feel confident that you will be able to promote a huge sale during the busiest period of the year, and let your hosting provider quietly take care of it, without any impact on the front-end of your website.
Host features you need to have
When it's time to look at the higher levels of hosting, be sure to keep this list of characteristics in mind while comparing different firms. You're looking for an ecommerce hosting expert who understands the importance of each one of these options and incorporates the features in their plans.
and WordPress specialization
In addition, search for hosts that actively take part in and support the WordPress open source environment. Companies that devote staff time and resources to the creation of WordPress core and testing of its features are both more likely to have an understanding of the field and to know about any potential issues when they occur.
Backups are included
In the case of online stores Data is the king. The numbers of your inventory, orders, customer accounts, and the total number of sales are crucial. Whatever your hosting service is, downtimes do happen, and you'll be able to rest assured that your website is getting periodic backups that are automatic and regular.
Unlimited bandwidth and storage space
What you don't want your clients to see is a bad gateway error when trying to load your website. The "white screens of death" usually result from overloaded servers that are unable to cope with the load on your website. This causes the requests to fail.
At the same time it is important to ensure you've got the space required to store your product information, order information, and customer profiles.
Find a web hosting service that offers unlimited bandwidth as well as storage space. Consider dedicated or cloud hosting that means you won't compete for resources with other websites on the same server and will scale easily as required.
Expertly designed security configuration
A reputable hosting provider is transparent about the security measures for websites as well as ensure their servers are properly configured with the latest software available for optimal security. They must be able to address any concerns you may have about security and enjoy a great reputation to ensure uptime as well as deterring hackers.
As a minimal, the hosting service must utilize PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliant servers that keep the customer's data completely secure and includes 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 an upcoming product launch or even a sales occasion like Black Friday. But, at the time of the moment of truth, your site crashes because of the surge of traffic coming in -- creating an unhappy customer base and a significant reduction in sales and revenue.
If you're required to manage this kind of spike in sales, it's crucial to choose a hosting provider with the capacity to meet the demands. Consider cloud hosting as your option; it can easily expand to accommodate the increased demand on your shop.
A global viewpoint for shopping at international stores
If your store does business worldwide, then you'll want an internet hosting provider that has the Content Delivery Network (CDN). More advanced hosting packages will come with a CDN, which copies the website's data to servers all over the globe and provides a cached version of webpages to visitors from around the world. It results in quicker service around the globe with better performance and assistance to your customers.
Free premium plugins
Additionally, certain premium hosting plans will also include premium plugins like Jetpack Complete, which provides additional security, one-click backups along with advanced speed capabilities. If you're comparing various hosting options to run a big-scale business having access to premium plugins can be the factor that tips the scales.
An integrated staging area
If you operate a shop that's operating round the clock, you can't always take it offline for update software, much less full redesigns. It's not a good idea to expose your earnings by running updates while in live mode.
A reliable host should have access to staging areas. Create a duplicate site with only one click. Run the updates, or make any necessary design adjustments and then try, test, and test. When you're ready, pushing your changes back to your original site is a simple process.
Professional and 24/7 assistance
Choose a firm that has great customer reviews and an easy way to contact a person via phone, email or chat, 24/7. There's a need to be sure that the hosting company has you covered at any time that the online store is operational. And when you're talking ecommerce, that's always the case, all day.
There's no question that quality hosting will cost more. However, the cost of discount hosting is lost profits, disorganized website interruptions and security problems and all these are things a store simply cannot afford. Hosting experts with you to support lots of products or sales as well as the peaks in traffic easily is well worth the cost to protect your most valuable assets and online reputation.