Selecting a powerful host for the Growing Ecommerce Store

Hosting providers are among your top website suppliers. It can make or break you in the case of large-scale businesses that feature many products and run a significant amount of online business.

In selecting a hosting provider the decision should boil down to much more than simply a price comparison. If you have an online store that is at the core of your business, you want to have the most efficient support possible.

What size is huge?

A lot of online shops start out in a small scale, and use basic, limited hosting packages on shared servers. When should you start considering an upgrade to more powerful hosting options that support massive enterprise?

Consider upgrading your hosting if you're seeing:

• The high amount of regular traffic. A good guideline for a large-scale shop is more than 100,000 per month, however less traffic may result in problems. If your website is loading slow or occasional outages on your site, or problems with transactions being delayed, it's time to upgrade.
• An abundance of items or customers. Most inexpensive hosting has an limit on storage space, however, if you're hosting many thousands of variants or products, along with associated photos, you may 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. The increase in traffic is one major reasons for considering a web update to your website's hosting. It is important to be confident that you will be able to promote a huge sale at the busiest time of the year, and let your hosting provider quietly handle it with no impact to the front end of your website.

Host features you need to have

If it's time to look for a more advanced level of hosting, keep this list of attributes in mind when you compare firms. If you're searching for an eCommerce hosting professional who is aware of the value of each of these options and incorporates it as part of their package.

and WordPress with a specialization

As a bonus, look for web hosts who actively participate in and are supportive of the WordPress open source community. Organizations that commit staff time and resources to the development of WordPress its core as well as the testing of the functions are likely to be experts in the field and to be aware of any potential issues when they develop.

Backups are included

For online stores Data is the king. The numbers of your inventory, orders customer accounts, orders, and total sales numbers are vital. No matter how reliable your hosting is, outages are bound to happen. You can rest easier knowing that your website is getting automatic, regular backups.

Unlimited bandwidth as well as storage space

The last thing you want your visitors to see is a bad gateway error if they try to access your website. This "white screens of death" are often caused by overloading servers which aren't able to manage the volume of traffic coming through your site, causing the requests to fail.

In the meantime it is important to ensure you've got the space needed to keep your order information, product details, data, as well as customer profiles.

Choose a package with unlimited bandwidth and storage space. Consider dedicated or cloud hosting, which means that there is no competition for resources against other websites on the same server and will scale easily as required.

Expertly designed security configuration

A reputable hosting provider is transparent about the security features for your site as well as ensure they have their servers set up using the most current software to ensure maximum security. They must be able to address any concerns you may have concerning security. They should also are well-known for maintaining up-time and discouraging hackers.

As a minimal, the hosting service should use PCI (Payment Card Industry) certified servers to keep the customer's data completely secure, and include an SSL certificate, which ensures every web-related communication is encrypted and secure.

Protection against spikes in traffic

Imagine you've worked hard to create buzz about an upcoming product launch or a sales event like Black Friday. Then, right at the time of the big moment your website goes down due to the flood of traffic coming in and creates a unhappy client base as well as a substantial decrease in revenue and sales.

If you're required to manage such a surge in sales, it's essential to have a host with an scalable platform that is able to rise to the challenge. Think about cloud hosting as a option; it can easily expand to handle the load on your store.

A global viewpoint for International shops

If you have a business that operates internationally, you'll need an internet hosting provider that has an Content Delivery Network (CDN). More advanced hosting packages will contain an CDN that transfers your website to servers around the globe, and then serves a cached version of pages to international customers. The result is faster access to your website around the globe, with better performance and assistance for your clients.

Premium plugins for free.

As a bonus, some top-of-the-line hosting packages include premium plugins like Jetpack Complete that provides extra security, one-click backup protection, and advanced speed features. If you're comparing different hosting plans for a large-scale shop having access to premium-quality plugins may be the factor that tip the scales.

An integrated staging area

When you have a busy business that is active round the clock, you can't ever take it offline to get update software, much less full redesigns. It's not a good idea to put your income at risk by running updates on a live system.

A reliable host should have access to staging areas. Make a duplicate of your site in only one click. Run the updates, or make any necessary design adjustments and then check, test, try. When you're ready, pushing the updates back onto the live website should be straightforward.

Professional, 24/7 support

Look for a company with excellent customer reviews as well as the ability to connect with a live person by phone, email, or live chat. It is important to know that the hosting company has you covered at any time that the online store is operational. When you're dealing with ecommerce, that's constantly, each and every day.

There's no question that quality hosting will cost more. But the price of discount hosting is lost revenue, stress-inducing website downtimes as well as security concerns that a store simply cannot afford. Hosting experts on your team that can support lots of products, sales, and the peaks in traffic easily is worth the price for the protection of your best business asset and your online reputation.