You can’t get away from it, it’s daunting and seems scary but you will need web hosting for your new ecommerce website.
Although there are hundreds of available web hosting options available on the web, it’s important to know which ones will work best so you won’t be stuck in a lousy situation of an under performing and unreliable website.
Before you go rushing into choosing a hosting solution, there are a few things to consider:
Cost
Cost is factors many business owners consider when choosing a web host, however, don’t let this be the deciding factor as there are many other variables to web hosting.
Costs can range from a few dollars a month to thousands depending on the traffic of your website. Predicting the potential of your business will help you save many headaches that come with cheap web hosting.
Reliability
So you’ve bought your new host but you have one problem: it keeps going down.
Whenever you choose a web host, check for the up time of their servers.
A website that’s down means it’s not creating business, sending your visitors to a competitor and crippling your potential.
Scalability
Although you may only expect to make a couple hundred sales, what happens when you gain the media attention and thousands of new visitors land on your website each day?
If you are stuck in a web hosting plan which doesn’t allow you to scale, you’ll be loosing these customers due to down time, bandwidth troubles and many other factors.
Being able to scale your hosting services is an important factor to consider for your new ecommerce website.
Customer Service
In the event that your website goes down or if there is a major malfunction, do you have someone reliable to turn to?
Make sure your web hosting has great customer service before you choose any particular hosting plan.
Web activity can experience ups and downs, it’s important to have someone there to make sure your site is back up and running in the event of a major problem.
Before you choose your web hosting, there are also a few things you should do to validate your final choice:
Research the Hosting Company
Before you make your decision, do a Google search to see what other customers are saying about your choice.
Try typing in the web host + “complaints” to see what the common problems people face with this web host and gauge the response these people receive from customer service.
Sometimes major problems appear in tech news sites such as major down times, read these articles and see how the company responded to these events. After you’ve done a thorough research, move on to the next factor…
Avoid Hosting Companies That Oversell
Many times, cheap web hosting solutions will share your bandwidth and disk space with other users, this is called shared hosting.
There is no problem with shared hosting as long as the company doesn’t oversell your server space.
Although you may be using a modest amount of available bandwidth and server space, you don’t know if the person you share with is maxing out the bandwidth which will cause long load times and possible down times for you.
If you can afford dedicated hosting, this is the way to go.
Do They Offer Proper Backend?
There are many other factors to consider when choosing a web host including the programming languages that work in the back.
PHP, MySQL, and other programming languages may be needed for your website when using content management systems and blogging platforms such as WordPress.
Sometimes your web host may not use the correct versions you need to install certain software packages or shopping carts. Do a thorough research to make sure the web hosts you consider offer the backend you need.
Final Thought
Now that you know this important information, you should be set to find a great web hosting company for your website.
Remember that you need to do thorough research for each of the hosting companies and the plans they offer, don’t always go the cheapest route and make sure they are both reliable and offer the ability to scale.
Changing a web host after the fact will give many headaches and downtime, which means no business. Making the correct decision before you set your plans in stone is a smart business move.
My Personal Recommendation
For over 3 years now I’ve used Hostgator as my main web hosting of choice. I’ve had no complaints or trouble with them so far.
With thousands of visitors to my other blogs, I’ve never had a hiccup so far.
In my humble opinion, Hostgator is the way to go.
