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Having the right eCommerce hosting provider to host your online store may be challenging. Many businesses did not succeed due to the poor choice of eCommerce hosts.
It may lead to slow website loading speed, lack of security, and unmanaged servers for maintaining your website. For a better user experience, we require a better eCommerce solution for every business.
There are many factors that may influence your choice of opting for an eCommerce website hosting provider. The below article will explain what eCommerce hosting is, what its benefits are, how you can choose the right eCommerce hosting and a few best eCommerce hosting providers.
What is eCommerce Hosting?
If you are into the website or online store business, you must have heard of eCommerce hosting and why it is essential. It is one of the crucial things that is required to host your website online and enhance its online presence. Hosting reserves a space on a server where it is present for online viewers.
In simple words, an eCommerce hosting provider offers server space and services to the website owners to manage and optimize the servers.
There are different eCommerce hosting services. eCommerce hosting offers various features like SSL encryption, allows you to set up payment gateways, ensures security, and enables you to scale to accommodate high traffic. It also provides you with the WooCommerce plugin, which is a sub-type of eCommerce.
Types of eCommerce Hosting
eCommerce has three types of hosting that help in determining your server’s hardware and setup. These eCommerce hosting types are Shared Hosting, VPS Hosting, and Dedicated Hosting. Each one of them is explained as follows:
1. Shared Hosting
This type of eCommerce hosting is best-suited for startups or small businesses. This hosting provides shared resources to the website and has limited resources. Various websites on the server share the resources which may lead to overload due to less resource availability.
If any of the websites is consuming more resources, another website(s) sharing the same server will not get enough resources and, consequently, face issues while running. If your budget is tight and no other option is available, you can go for shared hosting.
2. VPS (Virtual Private Server) Hosting
VPS hosting is one step ahead of shared hosting. In this case, a server is divided into various logical partitions and is assigned to multiple websites. This allows the website to use a defined amount of resources.
Websites do not have to share the resources, and thus, enjoy improved loading speed. You can use this hosting for a better eCommerce experience, but we have a better solution, explained ahead.
3. Dedicated Hosting
It provides a dedicated server for specific websites along with dedicated resources. This hosting takes the website performance to a whole new level.
Dedicated hosting enhances the website loading time, uptime, scalability, and bandwidth. This ensures complete server management with consistent IT support. It is the best hosting type you can opt for.
Benefits of Using an eCommerce Hosting
Following are the benefits you can leverage by using eCommerce hosting:
1. Ensures Availability
One of the significant factors in gaining more customers is the website’s availability. Good eCommerce hosting assures that the online store is up and running, making high availability round the clock.
The unavailability of a website can be very frustrating to end users. Availability of any website is necessary, else they will move to other stores for making sales.
2. Securing Customer Transactions
It is obvious to make an online purchase if you are buying something online. eCommerce offers authenticated SSL certificates to secure your transactions and protect your crucial information.
This also protects the website from hackers with multiple security layers. It provides the customer with trust that their details are safe with the online store and allows them to make more purchases in the future.
3. Easy Cart Shopping
eCommerce hosting offers you a shopping cart facility where you can add items and purchase them later. It ensures a hassle-free shopping experience while securing your checkout process. Also, it integrates your orders with the right payment gateway to proceed with the payment.
4. Provide Interactive Admin Panel
It allows you to manage multiple websites and helps in scaling the same. It offers an interactive admin panel to handle the website.
Things to Consider Before Buying an eCommerce Hosting
Before considering any eCommerce hosting, we need to check for the below features:
1. High Performance
Slow loading time for any website is a nightmare, and you have to make sure that your website delivers high performance. Customers tend to leave your website if they face delay(s) in opening it. It will incur you loss due to a technical glitch.
In such a situation, you cannot afford to use shared hosting that will cause frequent downtime. You can confirm the hosting provider’s claimed uptime using various online sites to get the exact uptime rate.
It should come with CDN, ensuring far-located customers access your website quickly without compromising on speed. It should use uptime monitoring to alert about low performance at any time.
2. Bandwidth
eCommerce websites tend to attract more traffic. To ensure this, you need a host that provides enough space and resources.
A typical eCommerce website includes large files, images, or animation that will take most of the storage. So make sure you choose the right hosting provider as per your business requirements.
3. Auto-scaling
eCommerce websites tend to scale variably with time and face more incoming traffic. To manage your website in its growing phase, you have to ensure that your host provides you with enough resources to quickly accommodate your changing business needs.
Auto-scaling ensures that your website will work efficiently during high-traffic peaks. If your host does not support auto-scaling, you will face downtime or server crash due to high traffic volumes, impacting your website identity.
4. Proactive Support
Every website is bound to some issues that may occur at any time. To ensure the proper working of a website, you will require a host to help you resolve your issues. Getting professional help can save you hours of downtime.
5. Ensures High Security
eCommerce websites are usually the target of hackers as they contain crucial customer and bank details. These websites are easy to attack if not secured by useful security features.
Make sure you opt for a hosting provider that offers multiple security features so no hacker can get your saved details. Security is the key feature that helps in earning customers’ trust in a website.
6. Automatic Backups
Every website must follow a relevant backup scheme. It is a must for businesses of all sizes. In case of any failure or data loss, you can quickly recover the lost data and keep your website running.
Best eCommerce Hosting Providers
Below are 5 of the best eCommerce hosting providers that are widely used:
1. A2 Hosting
In 2001, Bryan Muthig founded A2 Hosting, a web hosting company originally named Iniquinet. It was designed to handle a small number of clients. But with the advancement of cloud computing technology, the company had gained a lot more clients than anticipated by 2003.
Later on, its name was changed to A2 Hosting, named after Ann Arbor, Michigan, the town from where it started. The company continued to grow rapidly till now.
A2 Hosting is a green hosting company after its partnership with Carbonfund.org. After 2007, this company has proudly claimed to be 100% carbon neutral. There is no carbon footprint at its Icelandic data center due to its advanced geothermal cooling system.
A2 Hosting ensures 20 times faster loading speeds than regular servers. It comes with eCommerce-related plans for every type of hosting. It confirms 99.95% of uptime, although it may not be the best, it is enough for any website.
It provides excellent support and is available 24X7. A2H includes a free SSL certificate with all its plans, ensuring complete website and customer security. You can choose any A2 Hosting with a minimum of $2.99 per month.
Highlights:
- Comes with SSD drives that enhance the speed and performance of your websites.
- Increases reliability.
- Offers you Cloudflare CDN to improve site loading time.
- Ensures multiple back-ups
- Comes with unlimited storage and data transfer.
Details
- Pricing – $2.99-14.99/month
- Starter plan – Turbo Boost shared plan – $9.99/month.
Pros:
- Free security measures,
- 24/7 customer support, and
- Excellent site speed options.
Cons:
- Mediocre uptime guarantee.
2. SiteGround
Three university students launched SiteGround in 2004 in Sofia, Bulgaria. In 2004, the main founder, a technology entrepreneur named Tenko Nikolov started working as technical support as a law student. He is now the CEO of SiteGround.
Today, this company has more than 400 employees hosting more than 1.7 million domains globally. SiteGround comes under private ownership. This company has data centers in three different locations, namely North America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region. It covers London, Chicago, Singapore, and Amsterdam for server locations.
SiteGround was designed mainly for helping small businesses, startups, enterprise clients, and bloggers who want features like high-quality hosting, innovative custom solutions, and advanced security.
The web hosting provider is well-known for its WordPress expertise across the market and competitors. SiteGround also offers optimized and seamless hosting for Drupal and Joomla along with eCommerce platforms like Magento and PrestaShop.
It offers you auto-installation which makes the setup process more comfortable. SiteGround comes with CDN, improving the website’s performance. You will get free shopping carts, free e-shop transfer, and an optimized server.
The web host makes the website’s speed consistent by providing multiple servers in three different locations, allowing your customers to efficiently access the website.
It ensures 99.98% of uptime, which is impressive. You will get 24X7 support with an SSL certificate, and a monitoring system that will detect and resolve the problem. It also helps in managing spam at no additional cost.
Highlights
- Comes with an easy-to-use control panel, where you can perform tasks with one click.
- Ensures real-time tracking of servers to find bugs instantly without any downtime.
- Assures fast website loading time due to Cloudflare CDN, Supercacher, SSDs, Ngnix, and other technologies.
- Has an AI technology platform for blocking malicious bots.
- Comes with an isolation system, protecting your website if other websites on the same hosting platform get compromised.
- Ensures free daily backups.
Details
- Pricing – Range between $6.99 to $14.99 as per your selected plan
- Starter plans – GrowBig WooCommerce plan – $9.99/month
Pros:
- Daily automatic backups
- WordPress updates
- Searchable knowledge base for help & support
Cons:
- Low storage, and
- No automatic site setup with the basic plan.
3. InMotion
InMotion is a company offering hosting services since 2001 with its headquarters in Los Angeles, California. It has gained huge popularity across the world due to its service quality and the variety of its plans with WordPress integration and an easy-to-use cPanel.
Today, InMotion is a company that has more than 300,000 registered domains and hosts millions of websites globally, ensuring its place in such a competitive market.
Also, it allows users administrator access through cPanel. It has data centers in the United States West and East Coast. It offers services like Shared, VPS, Dedicated, and Reseller hosting.
InMotion offers you unlimited disk space along with free domains. This hosting provider works well for shared and VPS hosting. It is well-suited for startups and small-scale businesses. You can get eCommerce-ready features like a one-click shopping cart with InMotion.
The web host offers free SSD for faster content delivery and undertakes 160 hours of customer support. It comes with a free SSL certificate with daily automatic data backups and malware protection features.
Highlights
- Offers an excellent server performance with an uptime of more than 99.95% and a TTFB of less than 400ms.
- Comes with impressive live chat support.
- Ensures the free site migration service.
- Delivers a one-stop solution where you will get all the hosting features you need in one plan.
- Ensures the user will get plenty of room to grow with services like VPS, dedicated, and WordPress hosting.
- Guarantees a 90-day money-back option.
Details
- Pricing – $2.49-149.99/month
- Starter plans – Power shared plan – $7.99/month.
Pros:
- Strong shared, and VPS plans.
- Highly trained customer support staff.
Cons:
- Costlier than other providers.
- Provides no dedicated IP address on shared plans.
4. Bluehost
Bluehost has been powering over 2 million websites globally and has become a recognized brand name in bargain web hosting. They offer you steep price discounts as they are doing a large volume of business.
The web host offers its users a wide range of web hosting services. Bluehost provides services like marketing training, SEO services, social media marketing, content creation, graphic design services, email, domain names, and local business listings for increasing the traffic to your hosted websites.
Bluehost is for every business type from beginner bloggers to established eCommerce and large enterprises. The company was founded in 2003 by Matt Heaton and Danny Ashworth in Utah.
The web hosting service was acquired by conglomerate Endurance International Group (EIG) in 2010, and since then it has grown up to become one of the world’s largest providers of reliable and cheap web hosting.
Highlights
- Ensures 99.98% of uptime, unlimited SSD storage, unlimited bandwidth, and domains.
- Well suited for WordPress websites.
- Offers 24X7 support with a live chat system.
- Provides a free SSL certificate, spam protection, hotlink protection, and SSH access.
- Comes with a seamless WooCommerce plugin.
- Once you learn more about the Bluehost plan, you will learn its functionalities more closely.
Details
- Price – $6.95-31.99/month
- Starter plans – Starter WooCommerce – $6.95/month.
Pros:
- Offers an excellent uptime guarantee.
- Seamless WordPress integration
- Affordable pricing than other providers.
Cons:
- Limited storage on basic plans.
5. HostGator
HostGator was founded in 2002 by Brent Oxley at Florida Atlantic University. The company has gained popularity since then and continues to do so to this date. Today, HostGator has its headquarters in both Austin and Houston, Texas, and a presence at many others.
In 2007, they opened an office in Brazil and have won lots of awards for their consistent support and hosting services globally.
In June 2012, Endurance International Group bought HostGator. However, it is continuing to trade under the HostGator name. HostGator is one of the green energy companies and buys Green-e certified Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) from a wind farm in Texas. Its 130% green energy cools and powers all shared and reseller servers.
HostGator allows you to use unlimited FTP accounts, enabling you to transfer files across the network. You can leverage its unlimited bandwidth, domains, and email accounts.
The web host ensures 99.99% of uptime, which is the best of all. It provides excellent support, live chat, and phone service. It offers a free SSL certificate along with consistent server monitoring.
Highlights
- Comes with monthly billing options.
- You can install services with one click, even from the basic plan.
- Allows you to access the website builder at a cost.
- Uses a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to keep your site fast.
- Provides support options including live chat.
Details
- Pricing – $2.75-19.95/month
- Starter plan – Business shared plan – $5.95/month.
Pros:
- Ensures 99.99% uptime,
- 24/7 support, and
- Searchable knowledge base.
Cons:
- Costly than top competitors.
- No WooCommerce-related hosting plans.
Conclusion
eCommerce hosting is essential for hosting your online stores. They come with numerous benefits and help you to grow your online business. It ensures to retain your customers by providing features that are unique, admirable, and useful.
The above article has discussed eCommerce hosting, types, benefits, and how you can choose the right eCommerce hosting. There are plenty of hosting options available in the market, but the right one will help your business stay on top. So, choose wisely!
Frequently Asked Questions
1. How to choose the best eCommerce hosting providers for you?
While choosing the best eCommerce hosting provider, we would recommend you consider the below-given factors:
- Maximum uptime up to 99.99% for fast loading of your website.
- Easy scalability
- Automatic backup
- Unlimited storage and bandwidth
- 24/7 customer support
- Payment integration
- Security of customer data
2. Which type of hosting is best for an online store?
Shared hosting is one of the most popular and ideal hostings for eCommerce websites. The environment of shared hosting is closely managed to ensure fast load speed and zero downtime.
In recent years, cloud hosting is gradually becoming popular as it offers faster website speed and performance, high uptime and availability, scalability, flexibility, and server environment.
3. Is shared hosting good for eCommerce?
Yes, shared hosting is an ideal hosting solution for eCommerce websites.
4. Is GoDaddy good for eCommerce hosting?
Yes, GoDaddy has proved its effectiveness as an ideal solution for startups and small businesses who need basic eCommerce website features.
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