Sooner or later every small business retail owner considers a need to have an E-commerce Web Hosting Service. Do you have a website already? If not, you should think about having one the nearest time. We live in a connected world, so online presence can help your business to grow, get more consumers and improve the brand reputation. Indisputably, it will take some time to plan, maintain and run the website; however, the process should not be painful. In this article, we would like to help you get online and evaluate pros and cons of delegating the responsibility for your website to a managed hosting company.
What is E-commerce Web Hosting Service?
If you are completely new to the Internet, we should explain the basic terms first. A E-commerce Web Hosting Service company is a company that owns servers you will use to store the content (video, audio, documents) from your website and the site code. The servers can be dedicated, shared and virtual (cloud). They all differ in provided services and price. Which one to choose depends on your budget, business type (and, accordingly, the type of website you need) and the number of services you would like to receive.
E-commerce Web Hosting Service Prices for Small Business
If you own a small business, you choice would be more likely a dedicated or VPS (virtual private server) hosting. The price for dedicated server starts from $100/month, which is quite a tangible price for small business owner. At the same time, you will benefit from using the full resources of a server (which is good for an E-commerce Web Hosting Service, when you need huge amounts of data on your website to load fast). Moreover, you will need to pay an additional fee for a dedicated managed hosting, to get the full range of managed services.
If you have a reduced budget, VPS hosting would be a better solution for you. VPS hosting is a midway decision between dedicated and shared hosting. What does it mean? It means your website will have its own storage, RAM, operating system and monthly data transfers. However, you will share the server with other sites. The price for the VPS hosting starts from $25 (+ fees for a managed hosting).
Source: Webhostingsecretrevealed
What Features do You Need in an E-commerce Web Hosting Service?
It is difficult not to be messed up with an amount of features offered by different companies. Let us look at the main features you might need for your hosting. Those usually include
- an email (and also the autoresponders function),
- an unlimited monthly data transfers,
- a shopping cart,
- 24/7 customer support,
- a hard-drive storage.
Do not forget about such an important thing as the server’s operating system: Windows-based or Linux-based (or both).
If you plan to run an online store, think about magento hosting services or hosted ecommerce solutions. You will need to have a hosting with a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate, to safeguard the consumers’ information. (You, probably have noticed the green padlock near the HTTPS protocol (a protocol for a secure cooperation) when browsing other ecommerce websites or financial institutions, for instance, your bank. That is SSL.).
An SSL certificate can be provided for free in business hosting packages, otherwise companies will charge you for that extra layer.
Another thing to take care about is the site uptime. All the features discussed will be useless if your website is down (i.e. your consumers and clients are unable to get to you website and access your services or products).
Nowadays the majority of web hosting companies offer the 100% uptime guarantee, however, all servers suffer ups and downs for different reasons. The advice here would be to check whether the web hosting company is ready to pay back your money if the website is down.
Before you Start with an E-commerce Web Hosting Service
So you have decided on what type of hosting you need and which features you would like to include, you have also defined the best price offer. Everything is ready to get started. Take a minute and think that a website is a huge amount of work to do.
Are you ready to do it yourself and to dedicate a solid amount of time for it? If yes – just do it! If you doubt – a managed dedicated hosting will be a solution. Of course, you will need to pay some additional fees, but at the same time, you will save your energy for the business processes you are professional at. Time is money. And sometimes it is better to delegate part of your responsibilities to professionals.
We hope this article will help you to make the next step in your business and get started with your website.
