Selecting a powerful host for the Growing Ecommerce Store
The hosting company you choose to work with is the most crucial site partners. It's a factor that can either be the difference between success and failure in the case of large-scale businesses which offer a wide range of goods and conduct a large amount of online business.
In selecting a hosting provider the decision should boil down to much more than a simple cost comparison. If your online shop is the heart of your business it is essential to get the best assistance you can receive.
How big is big?
Many online stores start modestly, using basic and only limited hosting options with 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:
- The high amount of traffic that is regular. A good guideline for large-scale shops is more than 100,000 monthly visits. However, lower levels of traffic can result in problems. If your site is experiencing slow loading pages, occasional site outages, or problems with transactions being delayed, it's time to upgrade.
- A high number of products and/or customers. A lot of hosting that is cheap has an limit on storage space, and if you have many thousands of variants or products and images, you might find yourself facing extra storage costs from your hosting company. Storing information for large volumes of accounts for customers can result in similar problems.
- Outages on websites during high traffic. Spikes in traffic are one major motives to think about a hosting upgrade. It is important to be confident that you can promote a big sale at the busiest time of the year and have your hosting company quietly manage it without causing any disruption to 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 characteristics in mind while comparing different companies. You're looking for an ecommerce hosting professional who is aware of the significance of each of these features and includes it as part of their package.
and WordPress and WordPress
Additionally, you should look for hosts that actively take part in and support the WordPress open source environment. Businesses that dedicate personnel time and resources the creation of WordPress core and testing of its features are both more likely to have an understanding of this field, and also to be alert to any possible issues when they develop.
Included backups
When it comes to online stores the importance of data is paramount. The numbers of your inventory, orders customer accounts, orders, as well as total sales figures are of critical importance. Whatever your hosting service is, downtimes occur, so you can feel more secure knowing that your website will be receiving automatic, regular backups.
Unlimited bandwidth and storage space
One of the last things you would like your clients to see is a bad gateway error if they try to load your site. These "white screens of death" usually result from overloading servers which aren't able to manage the volume of traffic coming through your website, which causes delays in requests.
At the same time it is important to ensure you have all the space needed to keep the information about your products, orders data, as well as customer profiles.
Look for a hosting package with unlimited bandwidth and storage capacity. Think about cloud or dedicated hosting that means you won't compete for resources with other sites that are hosted 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 and ensure that they have their servers set up with the latest software available for optimal safety. They ought to be able assist you with any queries regarding security, and they should have a good reputation for maintaining up-time and discouraging hackers.
As a minimal, the hosting service is required to utilize PCI (Payment Card Industry) compatible servers that ensure the data of your customers completely safe, and include an SSL certificate, which ensures every web-related communication is encrypted and locked down.
Protection against spikes in traffic
Imagine that you've put in a lot of effort to create buzz about a new product launch, or even a sales occasion like Black Friday. But, when it comes time for the event to be celebrated the site goes down due to the flood of traffic coming in which results in a disgruntled client base as well as a substantial loss of sales and income.
If you have to handle the surge in sales, it's essential to choose a hosting provider with the capacity to rise to the challenge. Think about cloud hosting as a option, as it easily grows to accommodate the increased demand on your shop.
Global perspective for international shops
If your business operates globally, then you'll require a hosting service that supports an Content Delivery Network (CDN). More advanced hosting packages will contain an CDN, which copies your site's content to servers across the globe and provides an archived version of the webpages to visitors from around the world. The result is faster access to your website around the globe, with better performance and assistance for your customers.
Premium plugins for free.
Additionally, certain high-level hosting packages will contain premium plugins, such as Jetpack Complete with additional security, one-click backup protection along with advanced speed capabilities. If you're comparing different hosting plans for your large scale shop having access to premium plugins can be the factor that tips the scales.
The built-in staging space
When you have a busy business that is active round all hours of the day, it's impossible to ever take it offline to get software updates, let alone full redesigns. Don't expose your earnings when you run updates in a live environment.
A good host should provide access to staging environments. Create a duplicate website with one click, then run your updates or make your necessary design adjustments and then try, test, and try. If you're happy, you can push the updates back onto your original site is straightforward.
Professional, 24/7 support
Look for a company with great customer reviews and the ability to connect with a live person by telephone, email, or chat, 24/7. It is important to know that the host will have you covered at any time that you're online. If you're talking about online shopping, it's constantly, each and every day.
It's obvious that high-quality hosting is more expensive. But the price of discount 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 with you to handle a variety of items as well as sales and traffic spikes with ease is worth it to safeguard your biggest company asset as well as your web brand's reputation.