5 Must-Have eCommerce Hosting Features

Hosting provides your website with a server to make your web presence accessible. In simple words, it merely means that you buy server space and services from a hosting company. That hosting company, depending on the plan you have purchased, will handle all the technical aspects of hosting, ensuring you maximum convenience.

To help you choose one of the best eCommerce hosting plans, here are some of the must-have features that you should look for:

1. Higher Bandwidth and File Storage

Even if your eCommerce site is small, it will eat away a lot of space. You have to upload high-quality images (and videos) of the products. The traffic can surge at any time, burdening the server, resulting in downtimes and errors.

To prevent any such instances, you need higher bandwidth and file storage that can efficiently handle surged traffic and overall storage demand.

Admittedly, high storage and bandwidth would come with a price, and when you’re starting, you wouldn’t want to spend a lot of money on hosting. This is why you should ideally choose an eCommerce hosting solution provider that offers a simple plan-upgrade option. So, when the load is high, you can easily upgrade the plan with a simple click, ensuring zero downtime for your website.

2. Technical support

When you launch an online store, you will need to manage and maintain it properly. Updating the content, products list would be a part of your regular duty. If you don’t have a technical understanding of your hosting backend, errors and complications are likely to happen on your new website.

Here, if your hosting provider doesn’t have good technical support, your website might be down for like hours. This is one of the biggest reasons you must choose the best eCommerce hosting for small businesses with an excellent technical support system.

With these experts by your side, when you’re stuck with some errors, you can easily sail back to normal, ensuring zero or minimum disruption for the uptime and performance of your website. You wouldn’t need to spend hours figuring out what

went wrong and then another few hours in troubleshooting. The team of experts at the hosting company will take care of all your technical problems.

So, do look out for an eCommerce hosting provider that offers robust technical support.

3. Uptime Guarantee

E-commerce companies must pay close attention to the uptime guarantees and ensure that the selected hosting provider meets the uptime guarantee they are advertising.

Downtime can put a significant dent in your revenue, as well as reputation.

Did you know that in 2018, a 63-minute outage caused Amazon the loss of nearly $100 million?

While the majority of the eCommerce businesses aren’t Amazon-big, they do sustain losses due to such server-related outages.

To steer clear of such problems, make sure you’re choosing the best eCommerce hosting that offers a maximum uptime guarantee.

4. Robust Security

The security of customer information should be a top priority for any eCommerce company. There are regulations you will need to follow to ensure that data is stored securely. For example, if you are taking credit card payments, you will need to comply with PCI DSS.

Due to the sensitive information they deal with, e-commerce websites are often targeted by hackers. This is the reason you have to choose the best eCommerce hosting in India that’s not only aware of such cyber-threats but has also taken adequate measures.

Security scans of the server, investing in security solutions, doing manual checkups, and following industry standards are some of the few things every hosting provider must do. Make sure the one you’re going with, it does them too; ensure they care about web security just as much as you do; ensure they have the right infrastructure and expertise to thwart any cyber threats efficiently. If not, your whole e-commerce online presence would be in a vulnerable state of getting hacked, attacked, and exploited.

5. Regular (And Automatic) Backups

Managing a website is easier than ever these days, but that doesn’t mean things can’t go wrong. Your website could be hacked, may be broken after the update, or you may have deleted sensitive files by mistake – and that is just the beginning.

A single backup can save your skin in every case we mentioned, and it’s not hard to create. All you need to do is use an effective backup system and make sure your backups are securely stored.

Backups are insurance for your e-commerce store. When choosing the best eCommerce hosting site, make sure the host has a robust infrastructure for backup and that it offers automatic backups; manually doing it is a time-consuming, tedious process.

Conclusion

Bottom line: Don’t rush to choose any of the best eCommerce hosting providers. It is much more than just finding a plan and blindly purchasing it.

The growth and sustainability of your eCommerce business depend on its hosting. So, you want to be careful in the decision-making to ensure that you’re getting the best eCommerce hosting plan that provides you with all the essential features that an e-commerce business needs to succeed.

Take your time, understand your needs, and shop for the hosting accordingly.