What is E-Commerce Web Hosting?

When online businesses need to set up their website, they have an entirely different set of needs than those who are setting up personal sites, and even other businesses that do the majority of their business offline. Because of this, there is a whole segment of the web hosting market that is focused on the e-commerce customer and provides them with special features and options that you won’t find in standard web hosting.

For the most part, signing up with an e-commerce host is much like signing up for standard web hosting, although there are some very minor differences. While the customer will still be able to choose from packages that offer different bandwidth amounts and different storage capacities, they may also find an e-commerce web hosting company that can create and manage an entire Web-based storefront for them through a website. They will most likely also have other options such as shopping cart programs and SSL certificates.

E-commerce web hosting is available through both shared and dedicated hosting services. However, business owners need to understand that with a shared server, they will be sharing all of the features and resources that are on that server. Should their website receive a very large amount of visitors all at the same time, something that’s very common with e-commerce sites, it could shut down entirely. Most business owners find that dedicated hosting is the only way to run a reliable merchant site.

Because e-commerce sites can be very complicated and involve a lot of special applications and services, most business owners also choose managed web hosting. With this type of hosting, the web host will take care of the server’s maintenance, installations, and any upgrades it needs. This is especially beneficial to online merchants because while they may have a great deal of stock and business, they may not have the capital or the space to hire an entire technical team to manage their server for them.

Although e-commerce web hosting is not typically offered free of charge, the range of cost for this specialized form of hosting can vary from extremely cheap to very expensive; but cost should never be the deciding factor when you need e-commerce web hosting. Because this form of web hosting directly deals with the company’s profits, in the form of keeping their web storefront up and running, business owners should never decide based on who’s offering the best price at the time.

E-commerce web hosting can be very similar to standard web hosting. But when online merchants are looking for the right hosting provider for them, it’s important that they know the few slight differences that exist so that they can be sure that the web host will be able to service them for a long period of time. Changing web hosts is possible, but there is often downtime involved and that can mean big losses for a business owner. Because of this, it’s especially important that e-commerce business owners make the right choice the first time they choose an e-commerce web host.