There are nearly 2 billion websites running actively on the Internet. Almost every business, irrespective of the size, needs a website to establish its presence on the web and reach a wider audience. In this post, we’ll show you how to find high-quality ecommerce website hosting.
Building a website is like building your house.
Just like you need cement and wood as a basic necessity in building a house, building a website requires domain and website hosting necessarily.
Domain name is like a virtual address of your website. A user would use this address to reach your website.
However, what is the purpose of the virtual address when no one lives there? Or the visitor cannot even reach it?
That’s why you need website hosting along with the domain name.
Editor's note: GoDaddy now has a hosting centre located in India, enabling faster load times and better security for customer websites. You can read more here.
Website hosting explained
A website host is a place where all your files are stored. Sure, you could buy your own server, but because this is expensive most people rent space on a hosting company’s server. Without ecommerce website hosting, the only person that can see an online shop is the person who created it.
You need a reliable web host that stores your file securely on its server.
Web hosting servers are owned by web hosting providers such as GoDaddy that own servers across various locations. A website owner rents space on theseservers to hold its website for a particular fee.
When a user enters your domain in their browser, it points to the web hosting servers. These servers contain your website’s files, and the server sends these files back to the users so they can view your website.
Though there are a plethora of ecommerce web hosting options available, choosing the right one for your business is always going to be decisive.
While some web hosting is low-priced, they may be deceptive and rather affect your business negatively. How? Unreliable web hosting, speed or support issues could cause your website to be unavailable for periods of time — and every moment your website is down, you lose customers.
Hence, good-quality website hosting is worth paying for over the long run.
What are the benefits of high-quality ecommerce hosting?
A high-quality web hosting service offers:
Fast loading speed- Negligible downtime
- Stellar customer service
- A lot of remarkable features
These features can make or break a website and the business behind it.
Here is the list of benefits that you would get on choosing a high-quality web hosting:
Improved website performance
A fast-loading website is pivotal for gaining new customers and retaining the existing ones.
47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.
Thus, the short load time provides a better user experience resulting in higher conversions. It is also one of the major factors in search engine rankings.
Low-quality hosting may often result in untimely lags; especially on websites with photos, designs and elements that eat up space.
High-performing hosting servers are likely to give you faster page loading times and can grow as your business grows.
Stellar customer support
Every second matters for your business website. If your website goes offline in the middle of a launch or a big deal, you might be under water.
Fast and responsive customer support is highly coveted while you are in a digital world. A website host must necessarily have a knowledgeable support team and extensive resources and guides.
A reliable web hosting service provides round-the-clock support and resolves any issues quickly.
Enhanced website security
Research suggests that over 30,000 websites get hacked every day. Web security is one of the most overlooked areas that might hurt your business revenues as well as the search engine rankings.
This is even more important for ecommerce websites, or those that accept and process payments online. Hackers are drawn to these websites, as they contain data that can be sold for profit. This makes reliable ecommerce website hosting an absolute requirement for any business that sells online.
It is always better to protect your site beforehand rather than after a data loss.
While the low-quality cheap hosting services may often ignore web security, high-quality hosting takes an extra step to ensure it. There are various quality web hosting services including GoDaddy that offer incredible security features to avoid and tackle potential hacks.
Related: 5 ecommerce security tips from the GoDaddy experts
Keeps your data saved all the time
A high-quality website hosting service offers regular site backups. You can’t afford to lose all your website files in case of any cyberattacks. Backups come in as the Hail Mary to enhance web security.
Also, you might not want to create a backup of your site data all the time manually. Thus, automatic and regular backups are an uptick when choosing web hosting.
For example, GoDaddy web security includes automatic backups and 1-click restore to reinstate the entire site within minutes. The good news is that you can also choose to save these backups locally as a file or in the cloud.
Related: National cybercrimes are on the rise — best ways to protect yourself
A data centre near your customers
Besides the web hosting server specs like RAM, storage, and processor, an important detail while choosing the right quality hosting is the choice of your data centre.
A data centre refers to a place where your server hardware is stored. The location of your hosting server affects the page speed of the websites managed there.
Here is the reason: When a user visits a website, their computer communicates with the hosting server to access the site’s files and data.
In return, the web hosting transfers the data to the user’s computer.
Imagine a web hosting server located thousands of miles away from your customer. When they attempt to open your website, the request will go through multiple servers until it reaches the distant one where the site files are stored.
Page speed decreases as a result of the time taken by the server to transfer files to the computer and complete the request.
When you have an ecommerce site with a large volume of traffic and piles of data to transfer, choosing a hosting server miles away would only hurt your site performance.
No one will wait more than a few seconds for a website to display.
A website host with global multiple data centres lets you choose the best location near your target audience resulting in higher page speed and lower bounce rates. For instance, GoDaddy offers state-of-art data centres in India, North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific.
Wherever your customers are, GoDaddy has a data center near them.
Related: How to identify target market for your business
Flexible storage space
How much storage space does your web host provide? Is it flexible to expand if your storage is full?
Always ask these questions before choosing your hosting provider. Various unreliable web hosting providers restrict the website storage according to the plan limits. This way, you can only get access to more storage if you upgrade to a higher pricing plan.
Luckily, there are some website hosting services that do not restrict RAM or storage usage. You can reach out to their live chat or customer support team and request a storage upgrade.
Flexible bandwidth
Another question to ask is whether there are hard limits on bandwidth. The last thing you want is to have your website go down — just when your traffic was picking up.
Hosting providers like GoDaddy offer unmetered bandwidth across hosting plans, a big plus for high-traffic ecommerce websites. So your bandwidth increases as needed, within a very short time frame and before it reaches maximum.
Ecommerce website hosting summary
Hosting is the foundation of your website. Having a poor foundation will be long-term suffering for the website owners and those who visit it.
Whether it's a slow loading page, poor customer support, lack of automated website backups, or a single data centre, choosing unreliable web hosting may have various repercussions.
Hence, it is crucial to dive deeply into research and do some comparison shopping before investing in your web hosting service. Various web hosting providers are cognizant of clients’ needs and serve them the best hosting plans.
Here is a quick review of what a high-quality ecommerce website hosting will have:
- Unrivalled customer support including 24/7 live chat, email, and phone support
- State-of-the-art data centres spread across various locations, including those near your customers
- High-performing servers
- Automatic and scheduled backups
Read this article further to find the best hacks when choosing web hosting.
