Choosing An Ecommerce Web Site Hosting Provider
Ecommerce web site hosting is a service that allows one to publish web pages or web sites on the internet.
First and foremost, you should evaluate your service needs before choosing an ecommerce web site hosting provider.
Major Considerations
Here are a few points to consider when looking for an ecommerce web site hosting provider:
• Make sure you choose a provider who has at least 99.5% or greater uptime and a guarantee to back it up. Since it is your business, it is crucial that the website stays active 24/7, 7 days a week, particularly if you are spending good money to advertise the site on a regular basis.
• The level of connectivity to the internet is another important factor to consider. Fast servers with regular server back ups is your first choice. The ecommerce web site hosting provider should have a T3 connection to a major internet backbone.
Check how often your internet provider backs up the data – i.e. daily or weekly.
To ensure data security the internet provider must have a power backup system and should back up data to an external device in order to prevent data loss due to failure.
You will probably not see this disclosed in the providers information but it is a good test to contact their support desk and ask. From their response you can judge their overall performance.
You want a quick response, this will indicate a willingness to please which of course is encouraging.
• Your web site provider must meet your disk space and bandwidth requirements. Most ecommerce web site hosting providers offer between 1GB to 3GB of disk space, which is usually enough in the beginning, but check if in future more space can be purchased.
However with regard to bandwidth you should get as much as possible as you may have heavy traffic in the future and require more data transfer, but beware of paying too much for bandwidth you may never use, a better option is to seek a provider who offers scaleable solutions with a clear upgrade path for future expansion.
• Most good web hosting providers offer an online control panel to access and manage web site features. Make sure that your web site provider offers this service. The control panel will enable you to access, email, database, your ecommerce and all the functions for effective website management.
Our favorite software for this purpose is called cpanel and it is very popular amongst providers, for good reason it has been proven over time.
• Good customer support is essential as well, make sure that you can reach someone 24/7, 7 days a week. If anything goes wrong on your site your business could be on hold until you will be able to fix it with the ecommerce web site hosting provider.
Better still look for providers who offer an online chat system so that you can instant message their staff in real time.
The quality of the customer service will save you time and money in the end. If you have a problem you want to know that help is quickly at hand. Most providers have an FAQ section but you must ensure that you can reach an actual person in an emergency.
Here are a couple of the hosting providers we use ourselves and fully recommend:
Hostgator they use the cpanel control panel and offer a couple of shopping carts with other great extras in their hosting packages.
iPower.com, probably the most well known name for low cost, reliable web site hosting.
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