Choosing a Powerful Host for your Growing Ecommerce Store
The hosting company you choose to work with is the most crucial website partners. It's a factor that can either determine your success or failure particularly for big-scale retailers that feature many products and conduct a large amount of business online.
In selecting a hosting provider It should come down to a lot more than simply a price comparison. If your online shop is the heart of your business, you want to have the best service you can get.
How big is large?
Many online stores start modestly, using basic and restricted hosting plans using shared servers. What is the best time to start thinking about an upgrade to more powerful hosting services that are able to support a massive enterprise?
Consider upgrading your hosting if you're seeing:
- A high volume of daily traffic. A good guideline for an online store that is large in size is greater than 100,000 per month, however lower levels of traffic can cause problems too. If your site is experiencing slow loading pages and occasional website outages or issues with transactions timing out, then you should consider upgrading your website.
- An abundance of items and/or customers. Most inexpensive hosting has a storage space limit, in the event that you own hundreds of variations or products and images, you might find yourself facing extra storage charges from the hosting company. Storing information for large volumes of customers' accounts could cause similar problems.
- Outages on websites during high traffic. Spikes in traffic are one of the biggest reasons to consider a update to your website's hosting. If you are confident, you'll be able to advertise a large sales during the busiest times of the year. You can let your hosting provider quietly manage it without causing any disruption on the front-end of your website.
Host features you need to have
If you're looking at the higher levels of hosting, keep this list of features handy when comparing businesses. Are you looking for an online hosting expert who understands the significance of each of these options and incorporates it as part of their package.
and WordPress specialization
As a bonus, look for hosts that actively engage in and contribute to the WordPress open source environment. Businesses that dedicate staff time and resources to the development of WordPress its core as well as the testing of its features are both more likely to have an understanding of the field and to be aware of any potential difficulties that arise.
Backups are included
In the case of online shops the importance of data is paramount. Your orders, inventory numbers customers' accounts and the total number of sales are of critical importance. However reliable your hosting service is, downtimes do happen, and you'll be able to rest assured that your website is getting automatic, regular backups.
Unlimited bandwidth as well as storage space
What you don't want your visitors to experience is a negative gateway error when trying to load your site. These "white screens of death" typically result from overloaded servers that are unable to manage the volume of traffic coming through your website, which causes requests to time out.
In the meantime, you need to know you've got all the room necessary to save the information about your products, orders information, and customer profiles.
Look for a hosting package with unlimited bandwidth and storage capacity. You should consider cloud hosting or dedicated that means there is no competition for resources against other websites on the same server and can scale effortlessly as needed.
Expertly designed security configuration
A reputable hosting provider is open about their security measures for websites and ensure that the servers are configured using the most current software to ensure maximum security. They must be able to assist you with any queries regarding security, and they should enjoy a great reputation in ensuring up-time, and deterring hackers.
At a at a minimum, your web hosting provider is required to utilize PCI (Payment Card Industry) certified servers to keep the data of your customers completely safe and includes an SSL certificate, which ensures all web-related communications are encrypted and locked down.
Safety from traffic spikes
Imagine working hard to build buzz around the launch of a brand new product, or an event that is a sale, such as Black Friday. Then, right when it comes time for the moment of truth, your site crashes because of the tsunami of incoming traffic which results in a disgruntled customers and an enormous reduction in sales and revenue.
If you're required to manage this kind of spike in sales, you need that you have an scalable platform that is able to handle the load. Think about cloud hosting as a solution; it seamlessly expands to take on the demands of the shop.
A global viewpoint for shopping at international stores
If your business operates internationally, you'll need a host that offers the Content Delivery Network (CDN). Advanced hosting packages include a CDN that 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. It results in quicker access to your website around the globe, and better performance and support for your customers.
Premium plugins for free.
Additionally, certain premium hosting plans will also include premium plugins like Jetpack Complete, which provides additional security, backup protection with one click, and advanced speed features. If you're comparing various hosting options for your large scale shop, then access to premium plugins can be the factor that tips the scales.
A built-in staging environment
When you have a busy business that is active round the clock, you can't be able to always shut it down for update software, much less completely revamps. Don't put your income at risk when you run updates on a live system.
A quality host will include access to staging environments. Create a duplicate website with one click, then run your updates or make your required design changes and test, test, test. Once you're satisfied, moving the updates back onto your original site is straightforward.
Professional, 24/7 support
Find a business with excellent customer reviews as well as easy access to a real person via phone, email or via chat at all times. It is important to know that the hosting company has your back any time you're online. When you're dealing with online shopping, it's always the case, all day.
There's no question that quality hosting costs more. The cost of cheap hosting can be lost sales, stressful website outages, and security issues, all of which stores simply can't afford. The benefit of having experts in hosting on your team that can handle a variety of items as well as sales and the peaks in traffic easily is worth the price for the protection of your best assets and online brand's reputation.