Selecting a powerful host for your Growing Ecommerce Store

The hosting company you choose to work with is the most crucial web hosting partners. It can be the difference between success and failure, especially for large-scale stores that feature many products and conduct a large amount of business on the internet.

If you are choosing a host, it should come down to much more than just a cost comparison. If you have an online store that is the heart of your business it is essential to get the best assistance you can receive.

What size is huge?

A lot of online shops start out in a small scale, and use basic, only limited hosting options on shared servers. What is the best time to start thinking about the possibility of moving to more sophisticated hosting services that are able to support a large enterprise?

Consider upgrading your hosting if you're seeing:

• A high volume of daily traffic. A good guideline for an online store that is large in size is greater than 100,000 monthly visits, but lower levels of traffic can result in problems. If you're seeing slow-loading pages and occasional website outages or issues with transactions not timing out, then it's time to upgrade.
• A high number of products or customers. A lot of hosting that is cheap has an limit on storage space, and if you have hundreds of variations or products, along with associated images, you might encounter additional storage costs from your hosting company. Storage of data for large amounts of customers' accounts could cause similar issues.
• Outages on websites during high traffic. Traffic spikes are among major motives to think about a upgrading your hosting. You should feel confident that you can promote a big sale at the busiest time of the year and have your hosting company quietly handle it with no impact to the front end of your website.

Host features you need to have

If it's time to look for a more advanced level of hosting, keep this list of features handy when comparing firms. You're looking for an ecommerce hosting specialist who knows the value of each of these features and includes it as part of their package.

and WordPress with a specialization

As a bonus, look for web hosts who actively engage in and contribute to the WordPress open source community. Companies that devote their staff and resources to the development of WordPress core and testing of the functions are likely to have a solid knowledge of the area and be alert to any possible problems that may develop.

Included backups

For online shops, data is king. The numbers of your inventory, orders, customer accounts, as well as total sales figures are crucial. However reliable your hosting service is, downtimes are bound to happen. You can rest easier knowing that your website will be receiving regularly scheduled backups.

Unlimited bandwidth as well as storage space

The last thing you want your customers to see is a bad gateway error when they attempt to access your website. This "white white screens" typically result from overloaded servers that are unable to handle the traffic on your website, which causes the requests to fail.

In the meantime, you need to know you've got the space necessary to save the information about your products, orders data, as well as customer profiles.

Find a web hosting service that offers unlimited bandwidth as well as storage space. Think about cloud or dedicated hosting that means you don't have to compete for resources with other sites on the same server and will scale easily as required.

Expertly designed security configuration

An excellent hosting service is transparent about the security features for your site and ensure that their servers are properly configured with up-to-date software for maximum safety. They must be able to answer any questions you have regarding security, and they should have a good reputation in ensuring up-time, and deterring hackers.

As a minimum, your hosting company is required to make use of PCI (Payment Card Industry) compatible servers that ensure your customer data absolutely secure, and include an SSL certificate, which ensures every web-related communication is encrypted and locked down.

Protection against spikes in traffic

Imagine that you've put in a lot of effort to create buzz about an upcoming product launch or even a sales occasion like Black Friday. And then, just when it comes time for the event to be celebrated, your site crashes because of the surge of incoming traffic -- creating an unhappy client base as well as a substantial loss of sales and income.

If you're required to manage the surge in sales, it's crucial that you have the capacity to handle the load. Cloud hosting is a great solution; it seamlessly expands to take on the demands of your shop.

Global perspective for International shops

If you have a business that operates globally, then you'll require a host that offers the Content Delivery Network (CDN). Advanced hosting packages contain a CDN, which copies your site's content to servers across the globe, and then serves an archived version of the pages to international customers. It results in quicker access to your website around the globe, as well as better support and performance for your clients.

Free premium plugins

In addition, certain top-of-the-line hosting packages contain premium plugins, such as Jetpack Complete, which provides additional security, one-click backups as well as advanced speed options. If you're looking at various hosting options for a large-scale shop and you have the ability to use premium plugins could be one of the factors that tip the scales.

A built-in staging environment

If you operate a shop that's operating round all hours of the day, it's impossible to be able to always shut it down for update software, much less completely revamps. You don't want to compromise your revenue through running updates while in live mode.

A quality host will include access to staging environments. Make a duplicate of your site in just one click. Then, run your changes or make the necessary design adjustments and then try, test, and test. Once you're satisfied, moving the changes to the live website should be a simple process.

Professional support, 24 hours a day

Find a business with excellent customer reviews as well as the ability to connect with a live person by telephone, email, or live chat. You want assurance that your host has the support of a person at all times you're online. If you're talking about ecommerce, that's constantly, each and every day.

It's obvious that high-quality hosting costs more. However, the cost of discount hosting is lost sales, stressful website outages and security problems, all of which a store simply cannot afford. Having hosting experts in your company who can accommodate a wide range of products or sales as well as surges in traffic with ease is worth the price for the protection of your best company asset as well as your web brand's reputation.