If you’re on the lookout for a web hosting server wherein your commercial website’s files can be stored in a well-maintained condition and will also provide a platform for you to launch it, you should opt for an e-commerce hosting service.
An e-commerce website allows you to market your products and merchandise online, but to be able to make such a website available to users on the internet, you should select an appropriate e-commerce hosting service that caters to your specific requirements. Such a type of website hosting service differs from your standard web hosting and offers features to manage a commercial website effectively.
In this article, we will take an in-depth look into what e-commerce hosting really is, what its different types and platforms are, and the various reasons why one should opt for this.
Your Complete Guide to E-commerce Hosting
Now that we have already discussed what an e-commerce website hosting platform is and how it is different from a regular website hosting service, here’s something more that you should know about e-commerce hosting services in general.
What are some of the unique aspects of an e-commerce hosting service?
Some of the unique aspects of an e-commerce hosting service include a payment processing feature, managing traffic spikes, shipping and tracking, shopping cart software, database software, and security for the customers’ data pertaining to your e-commerce store.
What are the most common e-commerce hosting types?
The most common e-commerce hosting types are as follows:
Cloud-Based Hosting
This particular type of e-commerce hosting service makes use of computational resources from a third-party cloud provider, which in turn offers the cloud server, network, and storage.
In this type of e-commerce website hosting service, the various remote servers are interconnected to offer greater reliability. Whenever one hardware goes down, another server quickly replaces it.
Cloud-based hosting services are gaining insane amounts of popularity in today’s world when it comes to e-commerce websites owing to the fact that website owners can quickly scale resources based on their website’s traffic. Moreover, it provides pay-as-you-go pricing models based on the demands of the website owners.
VPS Hosting
A VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting service is a form of multi-tenant cloud hosting that has one main physical server divided into several smaller virtual servers.
Each of these allocated virtual machines acts as a dedicated environment so that you can host numerous websites on one single server.
This way, a security issue on some other website is unlikely to affect your website.
SaaS Hosting
SaaS (Software as a Service) hosting is another cloud-based e-commerce website hosting platform that runs your entire website, and the hosting process is included in one complete subscription.
A SaaS hosting service prevents you from the various IT workloads involved in the self-hosting process.
SaaS hosts manage various essential components of an e-commerce website like, the relevant application itself, its data, storage, server, software licences, and networking. Shopify and Adobe Commerce Cloud are two of the most renowned Saas-based e-commerce platforms.
Dedicated Hosting
The last of the most common e-commerce hosting types, a dedicated hosting service, offers website owners full access to the web server hardware.
It is quite similar to the VPS hosting type when it comes to gaining control over the system and application software; however, yours is going to be the only website hosted on this server, unlike VPS hosting.
Dedicated hosting services can prove to be quite expensive and are mainly used by large-scale e-commerce companies that have their own in-house maintenance staff.
What are the different types of e-commerce hosting platforms?
The different types of e-commerce hosting platforms are as follows:
Fully Hosted E-commerce Platform
This type of e-commerce hosting platform maintains your website’s files in a cloud, and you don’t need to set up the server or take care of the various server-side workloads.
Some of the most popular fully hosted e-commerce platforms include Shopify, Volusion, and BigCommerce.
Self Hosted E-commerce Platform
This type of an e-commerce hosting platform gives you the sole responsibility to host your e-commerce website.
Hostingfoxy.com Review 2024: The Ultimate Web Hosting Review Site
It doesn’t provide any of the native hosting services from the application vendor. Website owners are given the liberty to choose their web host and the type of hosting for their e-commerce store.
Moreover, in self-hosting, website owners get to select the e-commerce application and the infrastructure.
Some of the most popular self-hosted e-commerce platforms include WooCommerce, Magento, and Prestashop.
What makes e-commerce-focused hosting so important?
The main reasons why e-commerce hosting is so important in today’s world include the:
Easy website setup
E-commerce hosting services make it easy to customize and set up your e-commerce store, thereby making it available and accessible to users online.
You should opt for managed e-commerce hosting for your e-commerce website if you intend to have experts do the critical tasks for you like setting up your hosting server and various relevant configurations.
Minimised downtime
Finding the right e-commerce hosting service ensures that your commercial website is available to the customers most of the time, and you get to avail the various perks like enhanced engagement, increased traffic, customer satisfaction, higher conversion rates, and so on.
You should opt for a hosting service that promises an uptime guarantee of >99%.
No more slow-loading websites
The e-commerce hosting service of your choice will invariably ensure that the pages of your commercial website have quick responses. They do this via different procedures like caching, CDN (Content Delivery Network) optimization, and other speed and performance enhancement techniques.
Safe and secure payment processing
E-commerce websites can be extremely vulnerable to data breaches and cyber attacks, which can evidently lead to the loss of valuable customer data, impose fines and penalties, and degrade a brand’s reputation.
With appropriate e-commerce hosting services, commercial website owners can be sure to have a secure server that guarantees safe payment procedures.
Tips for Optimizing Your Website on a Shared Hosting Plan
Moreover, compliance assistance is available for their store.
Final Words
A suitable e-commerce hosting service is extremely important when it comes to effectively launching and running your e-commerce store. It offers various features like a responsive site, technical support, and server security.
An excellent hosting provider will certainly enhance your e-commerce business in every possible way with an optimal running website.
