How to Choose the Best Hosting for Your ecommerce Site | Sales Layer

How to Choose the Best Hosting for Your ecommerce Site

Vero Gascó
December 07, 2020

Table of Contents

What is ecommerce hosting?

One of the most delicate topics when creating a shop online or a website for a catalog is to choose your hosting package.

Ecommerce web hosts provide services to store (or host) your website. You can think of it like renting a virtual space for your online shop.

Up to 80% of online consumers never go back to a website if they’ve had a bad loading or browsing experience. Make sure that you have quality hosting that fits your type of shop or ecommerce platform to avoid greater problems in the future.

Types of ecommerce hosting

First and foremost, we have to distinguish between two big types of hosting:

Self-managed: With this type of hosting, you’re in charge of configuring and maintaining your hosting plan. This is usually a less expensive option, but it requires a technical team and systems administrator who are quite prepared and dedicated to this matter each day.
Managed: In this type of hosting, the hosting provider also includes the onboarding, configuration, maintenance, and monitoring of your site – both in terms of performance and in terms of the security measures necessary on a daily basis for your site. This is the most recommendable option for an ecommerce site as it will save you time.

And, in addition to the management scheme of your hosting plan, you can choose from 3 types:

Shared hosting

This is the most popular and cheapest hosting type for ecommerce and websites. It consists of a server that offers parts of its storage space to different websites. Therefore, you’d be renting a little piece of storage on that server.

Advantages:

It is much more affordable.
It is easy to configure.
It can be multi-domain and several websites can be managed at once.

Disadvantages:

You share the same IP with the rest of the websites on that server.
The space is limited because you share it with other users.
There is a greater likelihood of loading problems and errors.
It can negatively affect SEO.

Dedicated hosting

This is the most expensive option but also the most recommendable for a 100% secure and high-performance ecommerce site.

With dedicated hosting, you are hiring exclusive space for you, and this gives you more control over speed, storage, and privacy. This is also the most recommended method if your online shop is hosted on an ecommerce platform or CMS like Magento or Shopify, where you connect many pieces of product data.

Virtual Private Server (VPS)

With VPS hosting, you also get server space whose size depends on how many gigabytes you want to contract. Unlike shared hosting, VPS hosting is private and works independently.

How to choose the best hosting for your ecommerce site

When choosing your hosting plan, analyze all these factors to determine the best hosting plan for your ecommerce site:

Features included

Even in the same hosting category, each provider may include different packs that depend on the size of your catalog or online shop.

Bandwidth: The traffic to your website not having loading problems with your page depends on your bandwidth.
Domains: Check to be sure that it includes the possibility of hosting more than one website on your plan.
Space: Depending on the number of images that your catalog has, you’ll need between 1 and 4 gigabytes of hosting.

Speed and performance

The key to good hosting is to guarantee speed when loading your website. The majority of online users don’t wait more than 3 seconds per page.

Other aspects that influence the speed of your ecommerce site are:

Solid state drives (SSD)
CDN (Content Delivery Network)
RAM: The more RAM memory, the better performance.
Hosting location: Preferably in the same country as where the majority of your online traffic comes from.

Security

Another basic pillar of your hosting is the perfect security defenses to avoid vulnerabilities. Make sure that your hosting plan includes:

Backup copies
SSL certificate
Firewalls, DDoS protection

Technical support

Your hosting will surely give you a little trouble at some point. That’s why it’s important to ensure that it includes a technical support service; preferably one that works 24/7.

Customization

Choose a hosting plan that is scalable and can be customized in terms of the CMS modules you may need.

Conclusion

Choosing the best hosting option for your ecommerce site will guarantee you security, good performance, and better page conversion rates. Analyze your options well and remember to choose one that is scalable and can be increased as your catalog or business grows.