22 Apr E-Commerce Hosting: Key Features You Should Consider to Choose the Best Provider
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E-Commerce Hosting: Key Features You Should Consider to Choose the Best Provider
The last few years, electronic commerce experienced a massive growth turning it into a key element for boosting sales and promoting content. Even though social media is introducing online retail features on their platforms, it’s crucial to have a website.
Edirect knows how to develop top-notch solutions, from web development and website hosting services to online marketing solutions such as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). However, before deciding to expand your business beyond boundaries, we assembled some key features you should consider to make the best choice.
What’s E-Commerce Hosting?
Getting a website online seems quite complex. However, it takes just a few steps to get it live. These days we are pretty acquainted with the digital space and have plenty of expertise managing social media platforms.
Nevertheless, understanding the dynamics of how a website works and what it takes to create one may still seem puzzling to some. To discover all the benefits of an e-commerce website for your business, you first need to understand the basics.
Let’s get this straight. To be online, every website needs a space to be located or hosted in. This web host is called Hosting, and it provides a server for the website to be online and get the visits. Moreover, web hosting usually includes attractive features and different plans to be convenient with the average user’s needs.
However, traditional hosting services may not be enough for online stores, so here’s when e-commerce hosting solutions come on the scene. Their core functionality is the same, but online retail web hosts provide some key features to run the store efficiently. Some of those essentials are SSL encryption technologies, high-performance bandwidth and storage space.
If you take your business seriously, keep reading why it’s important to choose e-commerce hosting services.
Why Choosing the Right E-Commerce Hosting Is Essential for Your Business?
Many are the reasons why every business should have a website and online store. As we explained, the hosting services offer is vast, as are the prices and plans. Along with this, the main advice is to never go for the cheapest or free web hosts, as sooner or later it may end up being quite costly.
Basic hosting plans look attractive, but they don’t have the support and the efficiency your business needs to be online 24/7. Think about the consequences of having a slow website: customers will run away, and, what’s worse, they may never come back. The ideal load speed based on users’ behaviour is two seconds or less, so keep that in mind when analysing the available hosting options.
On the other hand, another reason to choose a dedicated e-commerce server is security.
Scammers, malware, and phishing are spread all over the internet these days, and they target vulnerable websites. So, if you process payments on your e-commerce site, SSL encryption and a secure payment gateway are two fundamental features.
Nowadays, users are familiar with these technologies, and if they don’t see HTTPS encryption, they will not trust your website – let alone buy from you.
Perhaps the major drawback when hiring poor hosting services is the downtime. Every time your site is inoperative, customers make their purchases elsewhere. This has a strong impact on your brand’s reputation and, of course, on your business revenue.
Key Features to Choose the Best E-Commerce Hosting Provider
E-commerce hosting options are abundant, and choosing the right provider to fit your business’ needs can be cumbersome. So, we highlighted some key features you should consider making the best choice and sky-rocket your sales.
High-Security Standards
When developing an eCommerce website, having high-security standards is a must to gain trust and avoid unwanted intrusions. Hackers always target online retail websites as they handle sensitive data like people’s credit card numbers and banking passwords.
Thus, your customer’s security should be your top priority when developing a website. Some features like SSL encryption certificates, firewalls, and spam filters, guarantee your clients that the payment processes are safe. Some e-commerce web hosts offer this certification for free with their plans, while regular hosting services may charge an annual fee. However, even if you have to pay extra for having security credentials, do it.
Gaining your customer’s trust is key for business growth, and a hacker attack on your site may cost your entire company.
High Database Performance
Your online retail store performance will entirely depend on the speed of the database. But, what’s the core function of a database? It serves as a storage for all your product information and pages, and helps users find what they’re looking for within your website.
For this reason, it’s crucial to have a database with fast response rates because, as we said before, customers won’t come back if they bump into a poorly performing website.
Keep in mind that sometimes regular hosting providers may hold several limitations when it comes to database capacity. That’s why you should head straight to e-commerce web hosts that offer higher-level plans.
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Reliable and Proactive Support
Crashes and issues may occur, and your business needs to have full proactive support to avoid losing valuable customers. You can’t afford to have your website down for even a single hour.
So, 24/7 support is one of the most relevant features to consider when researching the best e-commerce hosting. A good support team can provide an instant response, help you detect the issue, and fix it.
Plus, server errors can happen, and your website needs to be online as soon as possible. Hence, here’s when a top-notch hosting provider can make the difference, delivering quick solutions and keeping your business running.
Automatic Backups
At this point, we all know how important backups are for any device and service we use every day. And when it comes to your online store, it’s even more vital. Imagine opening your website and finding out that all the data is gone; all your efforts have vanished.
Setting your entire site again can be a stressful experience, and you may never get everything back as it was before. Therefore, you can’t afford such a downfall as it may cost you your entire business and your reputation.
That’s the main reason to choose a hosting provider that offers automated and periodic backups. However, it’s a best practice to perform the backups also on your own. There are several plugin options to make this process an intuitive experience if your website is developed in a CMS like WordPress.
WooCommerce Integrated
In case you still don’t know what WooCommerce is about, it’s the most popular plugin that allows you to create an online store within WordPress CMS. Due to its impressive features, it’s the largest provider for online retail services. Some highlights of this popular plugin are that it’s free, open-source, it’s responsive (which represents a major asset), and the most important feature: it’s secure.
If you plan to have a WooCommerce integration in your website, then you must know that not all hosting providers support this plugin’s performance. When doing research, always head to e-commerce web host providers that guarantee improved WooCommerce integration and performance.
Higher Storage Limits
As a business owner, we’re sure your main goal is to grow and boost sales. When choosing an e-commerce hosting provider, you should research and analyse the storage capacity they offer.
High-quality images are part of every website and mostly in online stores. You have to display lots of them to show your product’s features. Thus, if you plan to add more products, you need to have high storage capacity within the hosting.
It’s a fact that e-commerce websites need extra space than regular sites. So, read each provider’s terms and conditions carefully to make the right choice and avoid storage and loading issues.
Your business aims to grow, and you should partner with a hosting provider that leads that growth.
Intuitive Interface
This feature is essential, not for your customers but for you. Managing an e-commerce website can be challenging, and you should aim for hosting providers that comprise easy-to-use interfaces. Web host options are extensive, some are very intuitive with a clean design, while others can be intricate.
Can you imagine yourself wasting valuable time searching for the tools you need inside a puzzling platform? We guess not. Your business is valuable as also your time is, and that’s why e-commerce hosting is designed with sleek interfaces to focus on what truly matters: customers.
Outstanding Performance
To gain your customers’ trust and deliver an outstanding experience, your hosting provider has to rise to the occasion. As your business grows, you need a top-notch web host to handle all the traffic within your online store.
Remember, your online store needs to deliver fast loading rates and, if a rise in the traffic slows down the website’s performance, customers will leave. As we explained before, loading rates should be two seconds or less, or clients may never return after a poor experience. Besides, always choose e-commerce web hosts that offer dedicated storage. By doing so, you will have higher uptime rates and will avoid the frequent downtime of shared hosts.
Outstanding e-commerce hosting performance will help you deliver a peerless experience to your customers and escalate your sales.
The Bottom Line
E-commerce services are here to stay, and it’s a fact that the last few years have had impressive growth, and it keeps improving. At the same time, customers became more demanding, and engaging them is crucial to boost sales and create loyalty.
Furthermore, the internet is a crowded space these days, and being distinctive is mandatory to catch the audience’s attention.
That’s why at edirect, we deliver wholesome e-commerce solutions from intuitive and groundbreaking web design to website hosting and online marketing services. Trust your business to our experienced team of professionals and exceed your sales goals.
Contact us, get a quote, and let the sales roll!