5 Tips to Selecting a Web Host for Your E-Commerce Business

When running an online business, it is important to find the right hosting company for your e-commerce site. It needs to have the capacity to store product files, has adequate bandwidth to support the site visitors, and have security measures for online transactions. If you are not familiar with e-commerce hosting requirements, it might be hard for you to find the right company to host your site. Below are some tips you can follow to come up with the right choice for your e-commerce needs:

1. Site Requirements

You should know the size of the images that you will have on your website. This will help you find a hosting company that will provide sufficient disk space to store all your pictures. If you choose to display your products with flash files, you will need extra disk storage. If you have been analyzing the amount of website traffic, use this information to determine how much bandwidth you require. Should you mistakenly buy a hosting plan offering you insufficient server resources, your website will not function the way you intend it to, which means people will be frustrated transacting on this website and they will eventually stop buying from you.

2. Uptime and Customer Care

Having downtime on your site can make you lose both clients and revenue. Your e-commerce site should always be available online, no matter where the traffic is coming from. You want to find a high uptime percentage hosting company, something over 99.9%. A good hosting company with redundant service can provide this kind of performance. If you encounter any problem, you need to solve it as soon as possible. That is why you should find a company that provides customer care services any time when you need it.

3. Shopping Cart System

Another primary concern for small companies that transact their businesses online is having an ideal shopping cart that will improve the consumer’s experience. It is a program that typically runs on the web server, and which enables your clients to search for products, add them to the cart and then place an order. For the vast majority of online buyers, they enjoy shopping online mainly as a result of the convenience of internet shopping. If your site can’t offer this benefit, people will not want to do business with you.

4. Customer Interaction Features

For you to build trust and authority as a business, it is important to incorporate product reviews and forums to your site. Actual positive testimonials from the client will raise your sales because it instills confidence in your website visitors. Find out from your host provider if they offer these features so that you include them in your site.

5. Security

Security measures are important to safeguard online transactions. Your site should be encrypted using Secure Sockets Layer. Consequently, you have to ensure that your hosting provider gives you an SSL certificate. Most of them provide a shared certificate and as such, if you want a dedicated SSL, it will be an additional cost. You can click here to find out more about web hosting services.