Choosing An eCommerce Hosting Provider

If you're looking to launch a website, it's vitally important that you use the right web host - and if you're interested in getting into eCommerce it's more important than ever that you get that part right. This article hopes to serve as a checklist for everything you need to think about while you're choosing.

Uptime And Reliability

Probably the most important thing to bear in mind is reliability - not least because people won't generally come back to a site that they think of as being unreliable or broken. You need to look for a host that advertises a minimum of 99.5% uptime, and do the maths to figure out how much money you're losing every hour the site is down. This is particularly important if you're paying for pay-per-click advertising to drive people to your page, as otherwise you could find yourself paying for clicks that don't get anyone to your actual site.

Security

When you sell things online you're asking your customers to trust you with their credit card details and their personal data - things that could very easily be used against them by an unscrupulous interloper. You need to be sure that your host is HIPPA compliant, that you have both hardware and software firewalls available, and that your new website will support both SSL and 128-bit encryption.This is of absolutely vital importance to all ecommerce traders; the second you suffer a breech, after all, your business is pretty much over. Make sure you're looking after your customers' details as well as you'd want someone to be looking after your own.

Features

Everyone has their own preferences about what they need to run a website - which programming languages their site is written in, what kind of applications and applets they use, which ecommerce packages they make use of and how they want to get things set up. You need to look through the features lists of the web hosts you consider to be sure that they support the things you want to use, particularly if you're hoping to make use of a content management system that isn't native to your web host.

Technical Support And Customer Service

Things go wrong: this is an undisputable fact. The best web hosting in the world doesn't have no problems ever - it just has excellent customer service to ensure that when problems do come up they're dealt with swiftly, efficiently and politely. You're going to want to look for reviews of the customer services of the providers you consider, and make sure you pick one that has more than one channel for getting in touch with them - phone support as well as email support, for example, or a live IM service where you can chat with operatives in real time.