Archive for April, 2021

What You Need To Know About E-Commerce Hosting

April 4th, 2021

E-commerce hosting is an important part of e-commerce strategy. In a high percentage of cases, companies leave the choice of e-commerce hosting to the web development company to select. This is perfectly acceptable so long as the hosting costs are not over inflated and represent fair market price. Web companies often take this approach because they have intimate knowledge of the server architecture, have established relationships with the host provider and can make modifications to a client’s site with greater ease and at a reduced cost. If the client selects the e-commerce hosting solution, the anticipated upfront cost saving may be absorbed by the extra time it takes the web developer to institute changes on the unfamiliar architecture.

Here are some guidelines to consider when selecting e-commerce web hosting:

E-commerce website hosting security: One of the primary concerns of customers who buy goods and services online is the security risks of providing their credit card details. With the reported cases of online fraud, there is a reluctance of some people to participate in online commerce. If you are doing business on the web then it is important that your site resides on high-grade architecture with adequate firewall protection. This insulates your site from outside malicious attacks on databases that contain valuable credit card information. You should also consider subscribing to the ‘hacker safe’ service which is an independent testing service that checks the integrity of your site on a daily basis. Current market research indicates that organizations that introduce the ‘hacker safe’ logo experience an increase in sales.

E-commerce website hosting redundancy: A redundancy setup is very important for maintaining maximum exposure on the web. If you have a high velocity of traffic and your web server goes down you can lose money from the loss of transactions attributed to down time. By having a web redundancy setup, you are more likely to avoid this problem because if one web server goes down the automatic redirect sends traffic to the mirror server. This is an important consideration for high volume transaction businesses. Not all companies provide this setup and the additional cost involved in finding an e-commerce hosting solution that can provide this functionality could be expensive.

Web hosting for e-commerce cost: The cost of the hosting will depend on the platform, functionality and whether you are using shared or dedicated hosting. Shared hosting is simply a sub domain allocated on the server for your site. Other companies also have the same setup and multiple sites on the same server reduce overall operating costs. This cost saving is passed on to the client as a cheaper hosting solution. In some cases where the site has basic functionality requirements and a low volume of traffic, shared hosting is fine. Sites that are likely to require high bandwidth for video streaming or to cater for a high velocity of traffic may require a dedicated server. Dedicated web hosting for e-commerce is where the server is structured and setup to contain only your site. This is a high-end hosting solution for companies that have more specialized hosting needs.