If you have made up your mind to start your online store, many things need your attention – choosing a name based on your business idea, resources to stock your products or services, investments, building your store, and more. And when you think about building your online store, you need a reliable hosting service. Although you can self-host, it will require technical expertise, regular management, and resources. But if you use a hosting service, they will handle everything so that you can focus on expanding your business. So, let’s understand a few things about eCommerce hosting and how to choose one.
What is Ecommerce Hosting?
Ecommerce platforms are the software to help you build an online store, such as WooCommerce, Magento, Wix, etc. And eCommerce hosting is a complete web hosting service that a company offers to other businesses who want to build an online shop to sell their products and services. Ecommerce web hosting is useful for businesses of all sizes, from small to big enterprises. It comes with many capabilities to help you easily create, run, and manage your store. To help you build your online store, the eCommerce hosting provider will offer capabilities such as:
Ecommerce platform/software (store builder)A webserver to store your online store’s files, website designs, catalogsLatest technologies to ensure high performance, security, and complianceTemplates to build online catalogsCustomizable shopping cartsFeatures to accept and process sales ordersPayment processors like PayPal or credit/debit cardsTools to manage and track inventoriesAnalytics, reporting, and more
Ecommerce web hosting is mainly of two types:
Hosted: Hosted services save you from the hassles of maintaining the performance, security, upgrades, and other aspects of your online store. You rent a space from the hosting provider, who will take care of everything. It can be of different types – shared, dedicated, cloud, etc.Self-hosted: You use an open-source platform and your own server space to run your site. You can also rent your server from a hosting provider. It will leave you with all the maintenance services and become complex if you have no technical knowledge. It’s suitable for large enterprises with their own technical team.
How does it work?
If you want to open an online store, you can contact an eCommerce web hosting provider to buy hosting space or rent web space on their server. You can choose either a shared or dedicated server based on your business needs and budget and pay the monthly or yearly fee. After buying the service, the eCommerce hosting company will manage the technicalities of your online store. They will configure everything to help you get started quickly and start designing your site right away. They will also take care of software upgrades when they are available to save you time and hassles, ensuring all your site’s technologies and features are up to date. Before your plan expires, you can renew it to keep your site live.
How to choose the right eCommerce hosting platform?
The best eCommerce web hosting will make everything easy for you, from site creation to managing and running it. It will offer you capabilities to help you sell more and succeed more. Although many eCommerce hosting providers are available today, choosing a reliable provider is crucial. So, consider these points before you decide on one.
Budget
Budget is a significant deciding factor while choosing an eCommerce hosting. You can find affordable, moderate, and costly plans, but you must consider whether the cost will suit your business. The cost becomes even more evident if you are a start-up or small business. So, compare different hosting providers and find your best bet.
Scalability
The eCommerce hosting platform you choose must offer high scalability to ensure your business scales as per the demands. It will help you meet your growing customer demands and web traffic. Otherwise, you may disappoint your customers if your store does not scale with time.
Performance
Your store must exhibit incredible speed while users browse your products or buy them because slow websites drive users away. Therefore, ensure to get performance-optimizing technologies and good SEO capability, so everything functions well, and customers enjoy buying from your site.
Features and needs
Look for the features you will get from the service provider according to your needs. If you want to sell tangible and intangible products, the platform must support both. You must also get essential features like shopping carts, analytics, tracking and inventory management, multiple payment processors, lots of plugins, themes, and templates, integrations, and more. Now, here are some of the best eCommerce hosting platforms for you to compare and choose.
A2 Hosting
Get a blazing fast eCommerce hosting for your online shop with A2 Hosting and provide services across the globe, 24×7. It helps you provide a seamless experience to expand your customer base. You get all the essential resources to start your online store and increase conversions. A2 Hosting offers 40% faster performance with its latest CPUs, can handle heavy traffic, and helps improve your site SEO. It emphasizes all the necessary factors – speed, performance, reliability, etc. You will get a 20x faster page loading speed so that your customer enjoy using your online shop. For performance, A2 Hosting uses ultra-fast SSD and 3x faster NVMe storage in its server. A2 Hosting also offers Turbo Servers that feature Turbo Caching to store the complete HTML content in memory and provide the ultimate performance. Besides, you can deploy famous eCommerce platforms, such as WooCommerce, osCommerce, PrestaShop, OpenCart, Magento, WordPress, and more. A2 Hosting houses its infrastructure in various data centers worldwide, and you have the option to choose the nearest location for a better page load speed and 99% uptime. If you choose managed plans, you will get complete upgrades and maintenance patches, so you can relax and focus on your store. Start your online shop now with the Turbo plan starting at $8.99/month for 3 years and get 1 WordPress website, 50GB NVMe storage, free SSL certificate, optimized security, easy staging, etc.
Cloudways
Allow Cloudways’ managed hosting to take care of your site along with its upgrades and maintenance while you focus on growing your eCommerce business. Cloudways offers a scalable, fast, and secure platform to enhance your growth with the latest features and technology and helps you provide the best user experience. Choose from 5 IaaS providers to deploy your server within minutes, which will help build and host your eCommerce websites more efficiently. You can use a cloning/staging environment to test allowlist IPs, new features, and launch applications in a single click. Set a backup frequency instantly and install a free SSL certificate for your website. You can also adjust specs like RAM, CPU, bandwidth, and storage from its easy-to-use dashboard. For top-notch experience, Cloudways offers SSD-based hosting, built-in caches, optimized stack, PHP 7.3 ready servers, Cloudways CDN, HTTP/2 support, dedicated firewalls, auto-healing servers, automated backups, 2-factor authentication, vertical scaling, multiple PHP versions, and many more. You will get access to servers via SFTP and SSH and an option to distribute tasks among the teams across different areas and give them access to their work. A single team member can be a part of multiple teams by splitting projects easily between groups in less time. Cloudways provides transparent and flexible pricing for your business. Start your online store at $10/month with 1GB RAM, 1 core processor, 25 GB storage, and 1 TB bandwidth. You also get a free trial to experience the performance.
Scala Hosting
Give your eCommerce websites what they deserve: security, reliability, and faster page loading with Scala Hosting. You will get industry-leading speed and performance, free migration without effort, free SSL certificates for your websites, and a 99.9% uptime guarantee. Scala Hosting performs automatic backups so that your website and information are secure. Restore data whenever you want with a single click and benefit from SShield Cyber Security that blocks around 99.98% of web attacks and monitors your eCommerce websites 24/7 in real-time. If you already own a website, you can migrate as many websites as you want with the help of migration specialists. You just need three steps to migrate:
Provide login details of your old serverLet the migration specialist verify whether it works on the new server, andChange the nameservers.
In addition, Scala Hosting configures WooCommerce servers for you to get all the resources you want. Your WooCommerce website will also go through malware scans to remove unwanted junk. In addition, it performs automatic updates to the latest version without slowing your website. Get complimentary benefits like free managed service, CDN, domain, SEO analysis, SEO tools, SSL certificate, and more. Get your WooCommerce website now at $3.95/month with 20 GB SSD storage, a shared environment, unlimited emails, unlimited databases, unlimited bandwidth, and much more. Scala Hosting will refund all your amount within 30-days of purchasing the server if you don’t like it in any case.
Kinsta
Boost your SEO, user experience, revenue, and ROI with Kinsta’s WooCommerce hosting and benefit from ultra-fast load times. Kinsta comes forward to provide the speedier servers possible so that you can smile with your faster website and better conversion rates. Kinsta is built on the finest C2 machines and Google Cloud Platform’s premium tier network. Choose from 29 data centers across the globe to reduce latency and enhance page load speed. It helps you focus on your online shop by knowing its caching is in good hands. Kinsta’s fast server-level caching always ensures better functionality for your WooCommerce website besides my-account, checkout, and cart – these are excluded from the caching. Take advantage of its free HTTP/3 enabled and high-performance CDN solutions powered by Cloudflare. Additionally, Kinsta APM allows you to identify the issue behind your site performance with the performance monitoring tool. Gain complete visibility into how AJAX calls and MySQL queries slow down the online store. You can also identify the problem in your payment gateway and find which add-ons are not working correctly. You get enterprise-grade DDoS protection and a firewall to thwart malicious traffic. Besides, all your data is secure and safe with daily backups and restores. The price starts at $35/month, where you get a limit of 25000 visits, 10 GB disk space, free staging, free migration, free CDN, free SSL, and more. You also get a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Hostinger
Hostinger’s eCommerce hosting solutions provide all the necessary resources to help you easily and quickly set up an online shop. Start configuring your servers without any coding knowledge and building your website with ease. Besides WooCommerce, Hostinger provides a PrestaShop platform for your online store. It is a flexible cart and focuses on essential features that you need while designing. In addition, Hostinger offers a powerful control panel and a 99.9% uptime guarantee. Hostinger constantly improves server technology to increase customers satisfaction with your online store. Get professional support whenever you need it instantly, along with ultra-fast SSD storage, bandwidth, MySQL databases, daily backups, and more. Start your website today at a low price of $1.39/month and get one website, free domain registration, free SSL certificate, one email account, webmail access, DNS management, parked domains, FTP accounts, inodes, and more. Hostinger will refund your total amount within 30 days of purchase if you find the service not up to the mark.
Bluehost
Start your online store today with Bluehost, which helps you build your eCommerce website easily and promote it. You can quickly start selling from the online store backed by WooCommerce tools. Bluehost offers a fully customizable online store, secure payment gateways, and free domain registration as well as free SSL. You can set a perfect store for a better customer experience with plugins, expert guidance, security, and tools. Bluehost supports newbies, from setting up an online store to utilizing each plugin and adding products. You get WooCommerce powered by WordPress – an excellent platform for your online store with super easy configuration. You can choose from hundreds of storefront designs that are free and start customizing with the proper tools. Add products easily, track inventory, and control payment options to give freedom to your customers while choosing a preferable option. Moreover, you can create coupon codes as much as you want for promoting and enhancing sales. Monitor everything from inventory to performance from Bluehost’s dashboard and protect your visitors and their information with dedicated IP and a free SSL certificate. Make your website exactly the way you want with Bluehost features, such as multiple caching layers, site statistics, site monitoring, unmetered bandwidth, domain privacy, and a lot more. You will get eCommerce plugins like billing, payments, shipping, store, checkout, marketing, security, store management, and more. Get all the primary resources to start your store at $15.95/month for 36 months and get unlimited products, email marketing, jetpack free installed, website traffic analytics, and more. Get free office 365 for 30-days.
GoDaddy
Get a fully-featured and customized online store with GoDaddy’s WooCommerce hosting extensions. You will find more than 50,000 plugins and 10,000 themes for greater flexibility. It also offers more than 75 premium extensions to customize your online store according to your business needs, such as shipping rates, memberships, Google Analytics, product add-ons, and more. Follow simple steps and get online within minutes, where WordPress is installed, and the WooCommerce store is ready. WooCommerce is built with REST API to integrate and scale with virtually any service. Also, you will get an SEO optimizer, top-notch security, daily backups, and a domain. Sell anything from anywhere you want, starting from physical products to downloads, subscriptions, and services. You also get a one-click staging environment for testing, unlimited product listings, free business email for one year, CDN for faster page loading time, daily malware scans, hack repair, unlimited visitors, and unlimited storage. Start customizing your store at $20.99/month and sell your product like never before.
Shopify
Sell, ship, and process payments anywhere in the world with the Shopify eCommerce platform. It helps you create a fantastic website with powerful tools to find customers, drive more sales, and manage day-to-day tasks. You can turn your retail store into an online mall where customers can see your product, its price, read the features and benefits, and buy with an available coupon code (if any). Migrate your previous online store to Shopify without any hassle with the help of an expert and share your online platform on social media platforms to drive more customers. You will also find the tools that help create, execute, and analyze digital marketing campaigns. In addition, dig deeper with the insights to know where you are lacking from the easy-to-use dashboard and manage shipping, orders, and payments no matter where you are. Shopify integrates with more than 6000 applications to add functionality and more features to your online business. You can hire a Shopify expert and let them take care of everything from setting up a store to optimizing its SEO. Explore all the features, services, and tools you need to start your online shop, run it, and grow with Shopify. If you are new to the market, you can start with a low price of $29/month for unlimited products, sales channels, up to 4 inventory locations, manual order creation, free SSL certificate, abandoned cart recovery, and more. Start your free trial today to experience the performance and speed.
Nexcess
Nexcess offers the easiest and fastest way to build your online store with WordPress. It provides the most robust eCommerce engine for your online store and lets you design it beautifully without any professional designer utilizing different plugins and themes. Get premium hosting, optimized plugins, and StoreBuilder wizard without any line of code; you will find everything here easy peasy. Nexcess monitors every website 24/7, so there will be no security disturbance. It makes WooCommerce a better place for you with thousands of themes, image compression, CDN, on-demand performance testing, mobile-optimized product catalogs, auto-scaling, responsive design, custom field, product variations, and much more. Nexcess will maintain your site and automatically update the latest version of your plugins. And the good news – no fees for traffic and transactions. You will also get built-in advanced sales tools, fully-managed WordPress hosting, a beautiful store, and easy-to-manage websites. Start building your online store at $13.30/month and get 30GB storage, 500 hours per hour, up to 1 store, and more. Get benefits like 30-day backups, a staging environment, and unlimited email accounts in every plan. Not satisfied with the service? Cancel your subscription within 30-days and get a full refund.
Conclusion
Selling online is advantageous. And to ensure you build a robust store, a reliable eCommerce hosting platform is essential. It must provide useful features and technologies to ensure its performance, security, and compliance. Thus, choose a suitable eCommerce hosting platform from the above list to build your online store and grow more. Shipping woes? Here are the best shipping APIs for your business to save time and money.
