eCommerce Web Hosting

By Editor on May 7, 2012

Getting the right Hosting for your store is something you need to focus on carefully from the beginning as if you choose the wrong or rather inadequate eCommerce web hosting, it can be very difficult to rectify later on and could end up wasting your time and losing you money or clients.

What is Web Hosting

Website hosting is space reserved on a website server to cater for your files i.e. space and facilities for storing and managing your files so they are available to visitors to your site without them encountering any problems.

For this to work, your sites files need to be stored on a very high speed internet connected server with huge storage capacity, as well as the memory and the power to serve up your sites files to as many visitors as demand them at the same time.

Website hosting also provides updates, protection from attacks, backups, technical support, and a guarantee of reliability through things such as storing your data on many different storage areas.

eCommerce Web Hosting Services Guide

You need a website host and account to be able to run your website or shop. For any website, you need a domain name which is basically a unique label you assign to your storage area that allows visitors to see and access your files.
But for a shop, you not only need to store your pictures, prices, descriptions etc. in a database, you also need the software that runs your shop to be stored and managed on a web server.

There are many factors that determine whether your website hosting s poor, adequate or great. The most important of these include:

Website Hosting Space

This means how much space on a server is allocated to your files. 1 Gigabyte of space (1024 megabytes) lets you store 10,000 images of your products. Unless your shop is very large or incorporates lots of videos you are highly unlikely to run out of space with most paid for web servers.

Some in fact offer unlimited space as the majority of users only use a fraction of the space available. For example I have 10 sites running on a server with 10 Gigabytes of space but only use a third of it despite many of the sites having thousands of posts.

For a small Online Store, 1 GB is adequate, while 10GB should be more than enough for any medium store. In any case every website host will let you upgrade to a package with larger storage capacity without any issues.

Web Hosting Bandwidth

This is a measure of how much data can be transferred from your sites at any one time. Every visitor to your site has to be served pages consisting of text, images and possibly videos which take up memory. The total of this for all traffic or visitors to your site and all pages loaded at a particular time is known as the bandwidth or capacity. This is also measured in Gigabytes.

Many hosts offer unlimited bandwidth as they rely on the fact that few sites use a lot of bandwidth since they don’t actually receive many visitors to their pages. You however need to study your hosts terms as often, they reserve the right to charge you extra or move you to a more expensive package if you actually do use large amounts of bandwidth.

Website Hosting Uptime

One of the major advantages of hosting your website on commercial host is uptime. Maintenance often has to be carried out to ensure that your site runs smoothly. Because website hosts have a huge number of servers and can mirror your data (store it on several different servers and keep each of these up to date with your current file information), they can generally guarantee that your site will be up and running at least 99.99% of the time – which can be referred to as 99.99% uptime. This is important for any website and especially for one that runs transactions such as your shop because the last thing you want if for your site to stop operating in the middle of a sale.