Why Your Ecommerce Hosting Solution Matters

October 14, 2021

Why exactly is it important to choose a proper ecommerce hosting solution?

Picture hosting as a house where you live. It’s a place where you keep all your clothes, valuables, furniture, and other belongings. Similar to that, website hosting is a place where you keep all your digital content like videos, pictures, and documents.

The host company is the one that stores and maintains your assets for you. It also connects potential customers with your content, allowing them to reach your site and make a purchase.

With this in mind, you can see why a hosting provider plays a huge role in your business — which is why you need to be careful when choosing one.

Keep reading to learn what to look for — and what to avoid — in an ecommerce hosting solution.

Not All Ecommerce Website Hosting is Created Equally

Running an ecommerce business comes with its challenges, which is why you want to make sure your ecommerce hosting solution will do its part. That way, you can focus on the core values of your business.

Not all hosts put the same amount of effort or provide the same quality of service. Here are some of the things you may struggle with when choosing an unreliable hosting provider.

Low Uptime

Your ecommerce site needs to be online in order to do business, which isn’t always the case if you choose the cheapest hosting option. All the work you put into your online store will end up as a waste of time and money if it’s unreachable to your potential customers.

Uptime is a term that stands for the amount of time your website is online. It’s impossible to predict potential disruptions, but aim for a solution that guarantees you at least 99.9% uptime, like Nexcess.

Poor Loading Time

Some ecommerce hosting services offer low-quality hardware or have an insanely big base of clients located on a single dedicated server.

That means you’ll be sharing resources with an overwhelming number of users, which eventually results in slower page load time. Since 47% of visitors expect a page to load within 2 seconds, this will certainly have a large impact on the overall user experience — and reduce sales.

Lack Of Support

Another reason to choose your web host provider wisely is customer support. Imagine you wake up, turn on your computer, try to enter your website, and it simply doesn’t work.

Low-quality ecommerce hosting solutions won’t be there to answer your questions or offer some other form of support when you need it most.

Decreasing Search Engine Rankings

Poor ecommerce hosting services can negatively affect SEO for ecommerce too. Google has more than 200 ranking factors and website speed is one they take pretty seriously.

In other words, search engines want to help users find the information they need as soon as possible. That means, they prioritize high-quality content with precise information, but also give a huge advantage to reliable websites with short load times and higher uptime.

Low Security Level

Some ecommerce hosting solutions don’t provide you with extra security. That puts you at risk of viruses, malware, and more.

Your site could become home to all kinds of spammers. Top-notch hosting companies will make sure you have anti-spam protection as well as other reliable tools to secure your store.

It’s Hard To Move To Another Provider

Paying for cheaper service may look good at the beginning, but it won’t pay off in the long term. If you realize the service is poor and decide to migrate your website, they can make the entire process insanely complicated — which will have you spending time, money, and a lot of effort to fix things.

Why Good Ecommerce Website Hosting is Critical

A good ecommerce hosting solution is vital in offering a high-quality service. Here are some of the benefits you’re getting with good ecommerce website hosting.

Better Performance

When you have high-quality hosting, you won’t struggle with some of the essential features such as loading speed. This will have a positive impact on your website performance, which will lead to a better user experience and increased conversions.

Faster Response Time

Since 2010, Google has used page speed as a ranking factor in the search results. Even today, page speed is one of Google’s core web vitals used to determine ranking.

Aside from ranking, load time also affects the user experience. If your site takes too long to load, users will bounce away from your site and go elsewhere. A good ecommerce hosting solution will keep your store fast, which helps with ranking, visibility, and sales.

Security Of Your Data And Customers’ Transactions

It’s important for your customers to feel safe when buying products from your site and making online transactions. When choosing a web hosting provider, you need to make sure the company guarantees a system of backups on a regular basis and data redundancy.

A good ecommerce hosting solution will equip you with authentic SSL certificates to ensure your vital customer data is safe. Also, the hosting provider will protect your online business from hackers and viruses through various security applications.

What to Look for in an Ecommerce Hosting Solution

Now that you understand the difference between good and bad hosting solutions, here’s what you should look for when seeking an ecommerce hosting service.

High Performance

When you own an ecommerce site, you need a reliable, efficient, and fast host. Some companies that offer low-quality hosting have pretty unreliable infrastructure that can lead to crashes or slowdowns. Each hosting provider is going to advertise itself as the fastest and best you can get, so do your research thoroughly before choosing. Find one that offers hosting that’s optimized for the ecommerce experience.

CDN

A content delivery network (CDN) is simply a must-have feature that will ideally be included in your hosting plan. It’s a network of servers distributed across the world. These servers are made to host and deliver copies of a website’s static (or sometimes even dynamic) content like JavaScript, CSS, images, or video streams.

So, when a user that’s physically far away from your main server tries to visit your site, they will be routed to the nearest CDN server instead. That way, CDN makes load time way faster for everyone.

Scalability

Unlike some other websites, ecommerce stores can really vary when it comes to traffic. For instance, consider traffic surges around the holidays.

With this in mind, you need to be prepared to scale. Seek scalable ecommerce hosting services so the technical part of your online store can grow alongside your offer and the quality of your content.

Security

Ecommerce sites have sensitive information, such as user’s bank passwords, credit card numbers, full names, addresses, etc. This makes them a frequent target for hackers.

Plenty of hacks happen because of poor security. In other words, there are flaws in the server code which allow hackers to infiltrate your site, gain access to user data, or record passwords sent through the server. Malicious actors can even place malware on your site, which is one of the ways of targeting upcoming users.

Look for an ecommerce hosting service that provides security built into the platform — like built-in tools and always-on security monitoring.

File Storage And Bandwidth

Ecommerce websites are usually those that take up a lot of file space and get the most traffic. ‘Bandwidth’ is a term used for a maximum amount of data downloaded or uploaded in a certain period of time when you’re online.

Images are an essential part of any design. When building an ecommerce site, you’re going to need plenty of high-resolution images, which is why you want a host that offers enough resources to store and transmit your files.

Consider Hosting With Nexcess

Nexcess is a fully managed hosting company with 500,000 websites covered in our 20-year old history. We’re specialized in managed WordPress, Magento, and WooCommerce hosting.

In other words, we’re focused on providing the safest, most efficient, and generally the best ecommerce hosting solution.

This includes a hosting plan designed for the specific needs of your business, plugins relevant to your site, and everything else you need for an optimized online store.

With Nexcess, you get:

Trusted 24/7/365 Support. We value our users and want them to be satisfied with the services and products we offer. That’s why our customer support team is always available to give you useful information, help you out with issues, and resolve your doubts.
Excellent Server Infrastructure. Our Nexcess Edge CDN powered by Cloudflare is integrated into our platforms which makes it easy to use. Also, it’s capable of supporting both the smallest and the biggest websites.
Fast Ecommerce Hosting & High Uptime. Nexcess guarantees you fast loading speed, excellent performance, and 100% uptime. Our hosting solutions also include customizable tech stacks, auto platform & plugin updates, near-instant asset caching, and much more.
Scalability & Multiple Hosting Plans. With ecommerce websites, you need to be prepared for increased traffic at certain periods. Our hosting packages are suitable for big and small websites as well as the growth of your online business.
Security. SSL certificates are included in our hosting packages, together with plugins that will keep your website safe — in addition to always-on security monitoring.
Free Migrations. If you want to migrate your website, don’t worry. Our team will help you out with the entire process — and we’ll do it for free.