If you are a first-timer, you must essentially realize that a premium website can act as the online hub for your company- however, you must ensure that they are operational at best to be effective. You must essentially do away with connection troubles, excessive downtime, and slow response as these factors have the potential to ruin your user experience, thereby harming your brand’s online reputation and reversing all of your online marketing accomplishments.
This is why more and more people are opting for premium hosting service partners for their online businesses. They can help the eCommerce enterprises make a major difference in reducing the technical concerns to ensure your website is active, accessible, and available to your customers.
Here’s a detailed breakdown of important aspects that you must follow to select a good web hosting company:
Own Your Domain
Right at the beginning, you must ensure that you have absolute control of your domain for the eCommerce website. If you don’t have ownership of your eCommerce website’s domain, it means you have given someone else the owner of your company’s web address. You must also realize that this makes switching hosting providers, establishing a new website design, and preserving your brand more difficult.
Related: 5 Important Reasons Why You Must Register More Than One Domain Name
Be Straightforward About Your Technical Understanding
Once you have confirmed the ownership of the domain for your eCommerce website, it is important to introspect your requirements- this should be done even before you go out on the internet and start looking for web hosting companies.
You need to understand that being honest about your technical skills and desire during setup and during the process will essentially help you. Your answer will ideally determine if you need a managed or non-managed hosting solution.
Managed Vs. Non-Managed Hosting Service
You must always expect some variances between the suppliers regarding managed versus non-managed services. Moreover, the services you can use will also vary from company to company and plan to plan. Hence, you must ideally understand the subject while selecting a hosting package with a provider.
Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is the most basic form of web hosting where many accounts share a server. To put it simply, you can have multiple websites for hosting on the same server in a shared environment. This is where your website effectively shares server performance space with the other websites. However, you must also realize that your server’s capabilities are constrained to some extent in shared hosting.
Related: 10 Features That You Should Look For In The Modern Shared Hosting Plans
Dedicated Hosting
Even though dedicated hosting is expensive as compared to shared hosting, the difference in pricing is justified. Dedicated hosting essentially implies that you have a private server for an eCommerce website, which means you don’t have to share performance space with other websites.
VPS
The virtual private server is a dedicated instance for an operating system. You can run several VPS instances frequently on a single physical server.
Cloud Server
Finally, the last credible hosting option is cloud servers. To put it simply, you must essentially realize that this particular server type typically runs on public clouds. They essentially allow hosting companies to build whatever configuration you may need- under a conservative budget.
Related: What Is Cloud Hosting?- Answered!
Know The Volume Of Your Website Traffic
You must also pay substantial attention to the amount of traffic your website will receive when determining a web hosting service and selecting a plan. You must realize that web hosting plans fundamentally depend on the amount of bandwidth and server your website demands.
Plan Your Priority Needs
According to experts, you must have a detailed understanding of what to look for in a web host and hosting plan- this will help you pick a hosting company. You must ideally consider four major factors for hosting and website performance: speed, support, security, and scalability.
Speed
There’s no denying that your server speed plays a key role. This is essential since it can considerably impact the performance of your website. You must most definitely do away with slow-responding servers or servers that are overburdened.
This is because they reduce the loading speed of your website. Furthermore, you must also realize that the website performance is more than just server response time- your website must also be developed and optimized for speed.
Related: 16 WordPress Performance Tips To Speed Up Your Website
Support
As mentioned already, your expected level of assistance from the server will greatly depend on the plan you choose. Furthermore, you must also ensure that the hosting company you choose essentially honors the agreement you made for your package. Ideally, you could look into their infrastructure and systems to see if they can back up their promise and provide you with the necessary web hosting service.
Security
Ideally, you must choose a premium web hosting service that follows the security standards and preserves your data. This is all the more necessary given your website’s security is important. However, a web hosting service that can provide you with a secure hosting environment should be the standard choice.
Scalability
Lastly, it would be best to look at the scalability of the web hosting service provider when making the ultimate choice for your eCommerce website. They must ideally provide you with adequate scalability in the event of a traffic spike with minimum downtime. Moreover, they must help you improve your services over time as well. Your best choice for a hosting web service must always include a hosting platform that enables you to expand your website when needed.
Beware Of Web Hosting Red Flags
There’s no denying that you must essentially keep an eye out for big red flags while doing your due diligence on web hosting companies. You must reconsider your choice if you ever encounter any of these red signals.
Red Flag #1 – Offers That Make Overwhelming Promises
You must always reconsider your options if you come across offers that seem too good to be true. This is the existing issue across businesses, including web hosting services and internet service providers. If you can get your hands on some premium website hosting provider that can provide you with an excellent discount, there’s nothing like it. However, you must keep away from abnormally exciting offers on web hosting services.
Red Flag #2 – Any Option That Could Call For Vendor Lock-In
Ideally, you must make sure that you are not engaging with some service that could lock to a specific host. You must ideally look to develop your eCommerce website in a portable content management system. This will essentially allow you to run your website on multiple types of servers and hosts.
This will ideally ensure that you have a whole range of options available to you, meaning you are not stuck to your website developer. Furthermore, it also provides you with absolute control and ownership over your website. You can even choose to move it if you need to without any vendor lock. Lastly, it will also minimize the downtime for your website as you switch providers.
Red Flag #3 – Recent Acquisitions
Thirdly, you must make sure to look into the recent acquisitions when you have found a handful of good options for hosting providers. A little research about the web host will essentially help in knowing more about the service. It would be best if you ideally looked into the recent reviews in their past or recent acquisitions section. This way, you could effectively avoid a lousy web hosting partner and many issues that can arise later.
Red Flag #4 – Lack of Payment Options
There’s no denying that the internet is now stacked with countless digital payment options. This indicates that your eCommerce business should ideally offer all the popular options to your customers. To put it simply, you must choose to integrate and offer several payment options. You must look for another web hosting service or developer that doesn’t support the integration of multiple payment methods.
Related: Top 6 Online Payment Gateways For Your E-Commerce
Red Flag #5 – No Social Media Integration
Finally, you must realize that all popular social media platforms provide outstanding services that can benefit you. To put it simply, you can achieve a tremendous boost in online visibility when you integrate social media channels into your eCommerce website. They effectively provide the necessary resources for you to attend more online traffic. Now, if your website developer limits you when it comes to smart social media integration, you must revise your options immediately.
Over to you
When you are operating in the eCommerce industry, you know that there is tough competition; you know that the slightest downtime caused to your website can mean losing your customers and visitors. Consider these red flags and ensure that your website is functioning well during the peak traffic times as well. Get started and get selling with an efficient web hosting platform.
