16 Mar How To Choose The Right Web Hosting For Your Ecommerce Business
The eCommerce business is one of the most successful industries in the world today, and having powerful web hosting is crucial to staying ahead in this competitive landscape. With thousands of eCommerce websites vying for attention, your business is part of a fierce competition where every competitor is working hard to establish dominance. In this environment, there’s no room for complacency. Regardless of how impressive your product range may be if your website’s user experience is lacking, customers will quickly move on to another site.
The most basic requirement of a smooth user experience is a proper host that can handle the traffic. A small mistake in choosing your host provider, you can end up providing slow and undesirable services to your customers and that will drive your traffic away forever. Being an eCommerce marketer, it becomes your duty to provide convenient services to your customers and while they are on your website, you give them the best possible experience. A good user experience ensures that the visitors will keep visiting your website, bringing you more profit.
Now, there are numerous web hosting providers across the globe, so it is not going to be so easy to choose the most suitable one for your eCommerce business website. So, read on to look at:
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Key Points to Consider Before Deciding Upon a Web Hosting Provider
1. Hardware requirements
Choosing the correct hardware for the web hosting of your eCommerce website is very important. However, it is not the only factor to be considered for effective web hosting. While deciding on the type of hardware you will use for a web host, you need to consider the number of data centers you want and also, where would they be located across the globe. Analyze the types, and your requirements and first decide on the kind of data center and then decide on the number of data centers.
Generally, having more data centers is going to prove good for your web host as the load will be distributed, there will be a proper and sufficient number of replicas, failure management can be done smoothly, and many other reasons. After deciding that, you need to decide on the geographic locations of these data centers because that is going to decide on the response time of the requests. The more the distance more is going to be the response time.
Having the data centers set up at dive locations will ensure swift service to all customers across the world. Their page load time, download time, etc. will all reduce drastically. Also, it makes the recovery in cases of failures very fast and easy. Now, as you are done deciding on all these, and have been using them for years does not mean that it is good. You need to move forward with time. You need to keep on updating your hardware to the latest innovations. Keeping your hardware up-to-date will ensure that you will have the fastest host and that will improve your eCommerce website development.
2. Software for Web Hosting
After deciding on the best hardware for your web hosting, you, now need to decide on selecting the most appropriate software for your web host from the numerous options available. Depending on the size of the business, you need to select the scalability management provided by the software. If yours is a small business, you can settle for cheap and moderate software, but if you foresee any scope of growth in your business shortly, it is a wise choice to invest cleverly in software that provides good services. For large businesses, choosing software that provides some eCommerce optimization techniques and tools is a must. No software is a go-to for any kind of business. It’s purely going to be your call based on the requirements of your business. So, choose wisely.
3. Security
Security is one of the most crucial aspects you should first look for in the web host options available to you. The security features that you should look for are Firewall, DDoS Protection, SSL Security Certificate, Antivirus, Domain name privacy, Spam filters, etc. Compromising users’ data will not turn out to be any good for your business soon if not immediately affected. Hacking has grown to be a huge business nowadays. Code injections have become very common too. So, your web host should be secure enough to fight against such fraud and protect the reputation of your business in the market.
PCI Compliance must be provided by the web host you select. The personal information of the users who have created their accounts on your eCommerce website should be protected from a data breach. Many large companies have been victims of a data breach – Facebook, Quora, Orbitz, etc. and the personal information of thousands of users was compromised. Marketers are bound to abide by the PCI DSS standards to ensure the confidentiality of user’s personal information on their web host database.
4. Avoid “FREE” Web Hostings
Try to avoid and save yourself from falling into the ‘free domain for web host’ gimmick. The free service will put you in doubt about the provider. You would not know where you are getting the service. Also, the free service is only for a limited period. After that, you are supposed to take a subscription and pay a huge amount for the web hosting services. Now that you already have a comfortable host, you become bound to pay whatever amount they ask you to. Instead of falling for such a maneuver, go for a premium service. You might feel like it is costing you more than you expected, but if you want to provide a premium service to your customers, you need to select a premium host provider. Spending on such premium host providers will make sure that your website doesn’t crush easily and doesn’t have glitches (because of problems with the web hosting).
5. More uptime than downtime
You don’t want your website to be down most of the day. That is not going to do any good. Also, what good is a web host that requires maintenance more than working? So, when looking for a web host provider for your eCommerce website, check for the uptime they guarantee. In some cases, they promise money back in case of failing on their promise. Now, such web hosting will also ask for more charges, but they will be nothing compared to the profit you are going to make with your eCommerce website with such a strong and powerful web hosting. Ideally, your website should have only 90 minutes of downtime; not more than that, in a month.
6. Database
The database is an important part of any eCommerce business website. The products, the details of the customers, order details, etc. are all to be stored in and processed from the database. So, a web host that has good database speed is necessary. If the requests made by the users take a lot of time to process, then that is going to bring a lot of criticism. This might even drive your traffic away and you do not want that. So, you must ensure that the developers in your team focus on this matter, and based on that you decide on a good web host provider.
7. Backup
Keeping checkpoints at regular intervals is very necessary. Having backups will allow your website to come back on track in no time after a failure. The failures are going to come, glitches are going to be there; what you need to do is understand that ‘A stitch in time saves nine’. If you keep on taking backups of the updates regularly, you can recover from failures easily. The Automated backups will save you the effort of doing it all manually. It has now become mandatory for every online business, let alone eCommerce, to have automated backups periodically. You might even want to use some third-party software for backup purposes over backups by the web host.
8. Support
You cannot neglect this feature to look for while selecting a web host service provider. The website can go down at any time of the day. During such times, all you need is a technical team that can immediately look into the matter to solve the problem and get the website up and running in a very short period. This does not mean that you need to appoint a team for that. The web host provider should provide this service of support in times of failure. The support team should be available and ready to work 24×7.
9. Charges
Of course, it is necessary to look for the technical features while you choose a web host provider for your eCommerce website, but cannot completely let the amount you will have to pay go away unnoticed and not thought for. The features of web hosting are important, but so is the amount that you will have to pay for those. You need to check for the features as well as the price that you will have to pay. But that doesn’t mean you pick the web host provider that is cheaper than others. The features and the price, both go hand in hand. Select wisely.
In conclusion, there are many web hostings for your eCommerce website. You need to choose the one that is best for your eCommerce business requirements. Keep user experience as your highest priority and you will surely be able to choose a web host provider for your eCommerce website if you follow the aforementioned tips.
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