Shopping for web hosting
This article will deal with some of those additional issues you should consider in finding a host for an online or ecommerce store. All of the same considerations to finding general hosting can be applied to ecommerce hosting, there are simply a few additional ones that need major attention.
Disk Space and Bandwidth
Unlike many other sites, ecommerce sites always have to remain viligent as to their storage space and bandwidth requirements. The increased space requirements come from a variety of sources. One of the main space and bandwidth culprits are product pictures. Even on a site with a few products, storing sometimes multiple pictures per product can really eat into your bandwidth as people browse your site. It's also common for a prospective purchaser to visit a page several times as they are trying to make up their mind. If your online store will have a lot of products, 500 or more, A site with even limited popularity can easily exceed the bandwidth and storage limits of most lower end packages. So when attempting to determine how much space you need for your ecommerce site, just go by the number of products you plan on selling.
- If you have fewer than 100 products, the lowest tier hosting package will probably be enough.
- If you have between 100 and 500 products, step up to a second or third tier package. This should ensure enough storage space and bandwidth.
- If you are dealing with more than 500 products, especially if your products number in the thousands, you will want to investigate one avenue before commmitting to a hosting package. Many large suppliers now offer online merchants the ability to use product pictures stored on the suppliers server. This means your supplier carries both the storage space and the bandwidth hit, leaving you to serve only the text for the product pages. This can seriously reduce your online store's own storage and bandwidth requirements. If you find you still have to or want to host your own product images, go ahead and get one of the larger storage/bandwidth packages. Even if you don't use all of the space initially, with any success you will eventually.
Ultimately remember, any web host can upgrade or downgrade your hosting package to match your needs.
Shopping Cart
A 'shopping cart' as it relates to your ecommerce hosting site, is a piece of software installed to your web server or embedded in your web site code, that seeks to give your visitors a more complete shopping experience and you greater return per visitor. A shopping cart will allow your visitors to grab items from various areas of your online shop and then pay for them all at once, just like in brick and mortar stores. Online shooping carts have the additional ability of being tied to a specific shopper even sometimes allowing for retreival of the shopping cart months later. This can help drive repeat usage of the site. Since there are a couple of ways to add shopping cart software, there are some varying situations you might need to take into account as you shop for a ecommerce hosting account. Before you determine specific shopping cart features you may need, you should determine where your shopping cart software will come from. Places where you shopping cart could come from include:
- Your E-commerce Hosting Provider
Many web hosts that offer ecommerce packages, will offer a shopping cart as part of at least some of their packages. You should not commit to one of these packages unless the web host has a demo of the shopping cart so you can investigate whether or not it meets your needs. - Your Online Payment Processor
If you are going to accept credit cards you will most likely need a company to process your online payments. This can be anything from a merchant account from your bank to PayPal. Some online payment processors simple offer a shopping cart for you to use, but you can use a different shopping cart if you wish. Others may require you to use their shopping cart or a shopping cart from an approved list. Again be aware that this choice may affect your hosting, since your hosting account will need to be set up to run their shopping cart software. You may be required to purchase an SSL certificate (secure sockets layer) from your web host to help secure transactions with certain shopping carts. A proprietary shopping cart may also require a certain type of database or scripting language also. Overall, it will be more flexible if you don't tie your shopping cart to either your web host or your online payment processor, but your in house technical know how, or support costs would also increase. - Third Party
There are several very robust shopping cart software packages available that are not tied to any host or payment processor. Some of these cost and some are even open source. You will need to investigate the features of the various shopping carts available. Just don't lock in to a hosting account until you have a good idea where you shopping cart will come from.
Reliability and Support
Perhaps of greatest importance is reliability in your chosen host. One of the advantages of having goods available for sale online is that customers can browse your store and any hour of the day, at their leisure. If an online store is down at any hour, no customers can come in and nothing can besold. This means your ecommerce site is a mission-critical site and uptime is very important. So free hosting is out of the question, you need full service hosting to ensure anything even close to ~100% uptime. This is an area where you might even consider paying extra for a 100% uptime guarantee. If you are investing a lot getting this online store up and running, you will want to feel confident that you web host can handle peak buying times and dates without a hiccup. having your site down for a couple of hours, the Monday after Thanksgiving could potentially mean thousands of dollars in lost sales. You can find good information on the uptime of web hosts at this web site.
Finding the right ecommerce hosting company requires several additional considerations. Decide on the number of products you will start off with, your shopping cart, and then shop for a hosting company that offers good support and reliable service. You will probably need more space and transfer than an equivalent site that's not selling anything. Make sure you find a shopping cart that's easy for you to use and understand, and then make sure it will work with your web host. Finally, make sure your host has solid uptime, as an online store that's down isn't generating any sales.