When it comes to Ecommerce hosting and your livelihood, you shouldn’t be looking for just okay hosting, you need to find the absolute BEST hosting.
Here’s why, when it comes to Ecommerce (electronic commerce), the old real estate adage “location, location, location” get’s translated to “speed, speed, speed”.
There are a number of reasons for this, not the least of which is that speed is one of the indicators consumers have for trust. Again like location, if a store can afford a prime location, then the consumer tends to think this business is trustworthy.
The same logic follows nicely into the hosting. If someone’s site is hosted on a fast server (and especially if it looks good too) then this site is probably trustworthy.
In general there’s no single rule for how many ecommerce sites can be on a shared hosting server, or what kind of VPS hosting or dedicated server that you should be using for your site. Given the disparities in hardware on the market today it’s common to see some high end shared hosting far outperform the low end of the dedicated server market.
So if that’s the case, then how should a merchant judge his store’s performance? Easy, your goal should be for your Web pages to load in 2-3 seconds. If you’ve never tested the speed of your site head over to Google’s PageSpeed test.
While speed is the most visible and important thing an online merchant is looking for in hosting, it’s not the only thing. For Ecommerce hosting, merchant’s should make sure that the provider they’re going with are able provide excellent support.
The third thing a merchant needs to ensure is their access to support. In this day and age having tech support available, even if it’s 24×7 is actually not the metric you’re looking for. Being able to open a support ticket at midnight on Christmas day does a merchant no good if the person helping them doesn’t have any ability to help. The merchant needs reasonable access to experts if their store is having an issue that’s preventing people from shopping.
So to recap, when looking at Web hosting for your Ecommerce site here’s what you should be looking for:
- Speed, speed, and more speed. Make sure your pages load on average in around 2 – 3 seconds.
- That your host takes Ecommerce hosting seriously. For way too many hosts, Ecommerce hosting is an afterthought. You need to sign up with a host who takes your business livelihood as seriously as you do.
- Make sure that not only does your webhost talk a good game but you have access to knowledge ecommerce experts for both normal questions and emergency access for when your store is down in some way.
