Starting an e-commerce business comes with a number of challenges. One of them is choosing a host. Your e-commerce platform and hosting provider have a big impact on the long-term success of your online store.
With the wide range of hosting options available in today’s saturated market, it’s no surprise that many business owners struggle to find the best hosting for ecommerce.
In this Ecommerce Hosting Providers Guide to choosing web hosting for e-commerce, we’ll list the most important features to look for in hosting plans and offer a hosting comparison for e-commerce websites to help you choose the ideal solution for your business.
Table of Contents
Ecommerce Hosting Providers Guide – What to Look For
When you are no longer wondering how to start an e-commerce business, know all the best practices for e-commerce websites and are ready to put your ideas into action, it’s time to build your online presence. E-commerce web hosting is designed for running online stores and marketplaces and offers a number of advantages over traditional hosting.
All hosting providers will present you with a number of hosting options and their descriptions so that you can better understand what you are getting into. However, most of the time it is difficult to distinguish which features are absolutely necessary and which unnecessary hosting add-ons can simply be skipped in order to save money during the initial setup phase. Below we have compiled the six most important aspects of e-commerce web hosting that will help you choose the right hosting solution and avoid inflated prices.
High Performance
The rapid growth of e-commerce poses even greater challenges for online store operators. One of them is ensuring high website performance, regardless of the number of customers browsing the product catalog or placing orders at any given time. Slow page load times or the inability to get relevant search results inevitably lead to low conversion rates and abandoned shopping carts.
When choosing the best e-commerce hosting, pay special attention to the performance optimization solutions implemented by the hosting provider. The application stack used, including the search engine, the caching options and the amount of hosting resources available to your e-commerce website are the three most important factors that determine its performance. Make sure that your web hosting for e-commerce sites has plans for the platform you want to use, so that the server infrastructure is fully optimized for the specific requirements.
Unlimited Disk Space & Bandwidth
The amount of hosting resources allocated to your online store is crucial for choosing the best hosting for e-commerce. Here are the most important numbers you should pay attention to:
You can usually choose a hosting plan that provides a smaller amount of hosting resources if you’re just starting out with e-commerce and upgrading as your business grows and attracts more visitors.
Built-In Security Features
Guaranteed Uptime
Guaranteed uptime ensures that your e-commerce website stays online even in the event of heavy traffic or hardware failures.
E-commerce web hosting often includes monitoring services that allow your provider to respond to attacks or server-side issues in a timely manner. Two other important factors that largely influence guaranteed uptime are redundancy and scalability.
Redundant and scalable web hosting for e-commerce websites ensures minimal downtime by storing your website in multiple locations and adding more server resources to handle traffic. Cloud and high-availability hosting solutions use multiple servers instead of single-server resources to eliminate the possibility of data loss and provide up to 99.9% guaranteed uptime for mission-critical websites.
Look for guaranteed uptime of at least 99%, but always be aware of any additional costs for resource or traffic congestion. Does the hosting provider you choose to charge you extra when traffic increases, and how much do you have to pay for each additional visitor? Read the server-level agreements to determine what kind of credit you are entitled to if the guaranteed uptime is not guaranteed.
E-commerce Platform Integration
Choosing the right e-commerce platform is a crucial step in building your online store. Whether open source or proprietary, the e-commerce platform you choose will determine your online store’s functionality and narrow your search for the right web hosting solution.
Hosted e-commerce solutions like Shopify promise a quick and easy launch, but what is often overlooked are the high transaction fees. Hidden fees and the inability to easily switch hosting providers are the main reasons why more and more entrepreneurs prefer open source ecommerce platforms. There are several open-source e-commerce solutions that are better than Shopify and we recommend them for this reason. Magento and WooCommerce are the two most popular open-source e-commerce platforms that offer excellent features and extensive customization options for building a truly unique storefront.
Most hosting providers offer web hosting for e-commerce that is specifically tailored to the needs of websites built on these platforms. These hosting packages may include built-in plugins and extensions that integrate various payment gateways, shopping carts, sales analytics software, and much more.
Setting up a CDN (Content Delivery Network)
Using a Content Delivery Network for e-commerce is no longer just an option; it’s a must. A CDN speeds up your e-commerce website by bringing content closer to the end user, even if you have customers all over the world. A large number of geographically dispersed servers cache static content that, when retrieved, is loaded from the point closest to the visitor’s location.
With a content delivery network, you can significantly improve the performance of your e-commerce site and reduce bandwidth consumption. Given the large amount of dynamic content tailored to each site visitor, it’s even more important to deliver images and videos through the CDN.
When choosing the right web hosting for e-commerce, you should check if a Content Delivery Network is included in the hosting plan. While you can always use a third-party provider for a CDN, this can incur additional costs and keep you busy for hours configuring the Content Delivery Network according to the needs of your e-commerce business. A CDN provided by the web hosting provider for e-commerce websites is often pre-configured for the chosen platform.
The Different Types of Ecommerce Hosting Compared
The type of e-commerce web hosting you choose is extremely important. It will determine the type of server infrastructure your website will run on and the level of support your hosting company will provide. The e-commerce website hosting comparison below will help you find the best solution for your online store.
The Best Ecommerce Hosting Providers
Unfortunately, not all hosting providers offer good e-commerce web hosting. But now that you know what features to look out for, it will be much easier to find the best e-commerce hosting solution. Below we have compiled the five best ecommerce hosting providers and in this ecommerce website hosting comparison, we will check what makes them stand out.
1. Nexcess
Nexcess focuses on providing fully managed hosting for e-commerce, optimized specifically for Magento and WooCommerce. The combination of powerful open-source software, cloud hosting architecture and the best support in the industry makes Nexcess the hosting provider of choice for online stores and marketplaces of any size and complexity.
Nexcess web hosting for e-commerce also offers a range of advanced features for store management and analytics. Sales Performance Monitor provides intelligent e-commerce monitoring with personalized revenue insights to help you stay profitable.
Performance & Uptime
Nexcess is a high-performance hosting with a scalable infrastructure and a lightning-fast content delivery network with more than 20 points of presence worldwide. With all hosting plans, at least 10 PHP workers are assigned to your website, with the best caching solutions enabled. With a guaranteed uptime of over 99.9% and automatic scaling to safely handle traffic peaks, you can forget about poor performance and downtime.
Security
Nexcess offers PCI-compliant web hosting for e-commerce with built-in security solutions for businesses, regardless of the hosting plan you choose. Web application firewall on the server side paired with iThemes Pro, the award-winning security plugin, make Nexcess managed WooCommerce plans the best web hosting for WordPress e-commerce websites. Free SSL certificates and 30 days of free daily website backups provide an extra layer of security to safeguard the shopping experience and protect your store from data loss.
2. Cloudways
Cloudways is a managed hosting provider that offers cloud hosting for all types of websites, including e-commerce. Cloud hosting solutions were created to combine the flexibility of VPS and dedicated hosting with the high scalability of cloud hosting architecture.
Cloudways is mainly considered for medium to large online stores and marketplaces that need more freedom to create a customized hosting infrastructure that better suits the needs of their e-commerce business. If you are just getting into e-commerce and need a beginner-friendly hosting solution, Cloudways might not be right for you.
Performance & Uptime
Cloudways ensures high performance through caching and a number of other optimizations, including a CDN. Similar to Nexcess, Cloudways offers a guaranteed uptime of over 99.9% due to the high scalability of its cloud hosting architecture.
Security
Cloudways offers hosting infrastructure from five different cloud providers. Google Compute Engine, Amazon AWS and Linode at Cloudways guarantee PCI-compliant hosting. Cloudways offers free SSL certificates and automatic backups, as well as dedicated firewalls to keep your e-commerce business safe.
3. Bluehost
Bluehost offers a wide range of shared, VPS and dedicated hosting plans for websites and web applications of all kinds. However, you can find two hosting solutions for WooCommerce. Bluehost WooCommerce hosting is very affordable and beginner-friendly, which makes it one of the best web hosting options for small business e-commerce websites.
Bluehost is ideal for hosting small online stores based on WooCommerce. A free domain name for the first year, SSL and a number of other e-commerce solutions for pricing and product management make it even more attractive. For all the undisputed advantages Bluehost offers in e-commerce web hosting, its feature set is very limited compared to the other providers mentioned in this e-commerce website hosting comparison.
Performance & Uptime
Bluehost does not reveal what infrastructure optimizations are implemented to ensure high performance. A content delivery network is not included. Bluehost encourages its customers to use Cloudflare instead.
Security
Bluehost offers free SSL certificates and secure payments for all WooCommerce online stores and marketplaces. The Jetpack Backups plugin is offered for managing website backups and performing one-click restores.
4. WP Engine
WP Engine provides hosting services exclusively for WordPress websites and maintains a highly optimized hosting infrastructure for online businesses of all sizes. From small WooCommerce stores to large mission-critical portals and marketplaces, WP Engine offers hosting solutions for a wide audience of business owners.
WP Engine positions itself as a premium hosting, so its WooCommerce plans are not the cheapest you can find. With only 10G of storage and 50G of bandwidth included in the smallest WooCommerce plans, choosing WP Engine doesn’t sound like a reasonable option for small businesses. WP Engine is definitely not the best web hosting for small business e-commerce websites.
Performance & Uptime
The high performance and guaranteed uptime of over 99.9% are achieved through a proprietary caching solution that WP Engine implements. A content delivery network gives you lightning-fast page load times with minimal latency.
Security
According to the provider’s terms of service, WP Engine is not allowed to store or process credit card data. Instead, you are advised to use a third-party payment gateway that can accept and process credit card payments on your behalf. However, WP Engine offers free scheduled and on-demand backups and SSL certificates to protect your e-commerce website, as well as automatic WordPress core and plugin updates.
5. SiteGround
With its cloud hosting architecture, SiteGround can provide high performance and security for your e-commerce business at an affordable price. Similar to Bluehost, SiteGround focuses on beginner-friendly hosting for WooCommerce, but it includes a very limited number of features.
The WooCommerce hosting plans offer all the same features that SiteGround offers in its hosting solutions for WordPress. It covers the basics of web hosting, but doesn’t offer any additional tools for managing e-commerce, so you’ll have to look for the best third-party solutions yourself. The small amount of storage space included makes it difficult to run larger e-commerce websites.
Performance & Uptime
High website performance is ensured by the cloud hosting architecture and caching. SiteGround offers a range of caching solutions to speed up e-commerce websites, including page and object caching. A CDN with over ten points of presence is included in all WooCommerce hosting plans. In terms of performance, SiteGround might be the best web hosting for WordPress e-commerce websites that have just launched and want to ensure fast page loading speed.
Security
SiteGround does not offer PCI-compliant hosting, but it does have a number of security tweaks that allow you to protect your e-commerce website from hackers. These include a web application firewall with a large number of custom security rules tailored to WordPress and a proprietary anti-bot system. Free SSL certificates are available for all websites.
Conclusion
Finding the right e-commerce web hosting that will meet your company’s needs is a difficult, but not impossible task. Now that you know what features to look for in an e-commerce hosting plan, you can easily find the best solution. Opt for high-performance hosting with a content delivery network, advanced security features, and built-in tools for managing your online store.
Nexcess makes it easy to build your online presence by offering unrivaled enterprise-grade performance and security, the best support in the industry, and a wide range of powerful e-commerce tools. Fully managed WooCommerce or StoreBuilder hosting plans allow you to create the storefront of your dreams and stand out from the competition.
Looking for something more advanced with more customization options? Managed Magento hosting could be just what you’re looking for. Empower your e-commerce business with fully managed cloud hosting from Nexcess to give your website the platform it deserves.
FAQ’s
What is eCommerce Hosting, & Why is It Important for Online Businesses?
eCommerce hosting refers to specialized web hosting designed to support online stores. It’s important because it offers features like secure payment gateways, scalability and optimal performance for seamless online shopping experiences.
What Are the Best eCommerce Hosting Providers Known for Their Reliability and Performance?
The best eCommerce hosting providers include Shopify, WooCommerce (hosted on WordPress), BigCommerce, Magento and Wix eCommerce.
Can I Easily Set Up an Online Store With These Hosting Providers, Even Without Technical Expertise?
Yes, these platforms offer user-friendly interfaces and intuitive setup wizards, so creating and managing an online store is possible even without advanced technical knowledge.
Is Security a Priority With These eCommerce Hosting Providers? How Do They Protect Customer Data?
Yes, security is a top priority. These providers offer SSL certificates, secure payment gateways and regular security updates to protect customer data and prevent security breaches.
Do These Hosting Providers Offer Customizable Design Options for a Unique Look of the Online Store?
Absolutely, these platforms offer a range of customizable templates and themes to create a visually appealing and unique design for the online store.
Can I Easily Manage My Inventory, Track Orders & Manage Customer Information With These Platforms?
Yes, these platforms have built-in tools for inventory management, order tracking, and customer information management that simplify the operation of the store.
Alex Colt is a tech blogger who is deeply passionate about technology. He writes on an array of subjects ranging from the latest smartphones and laptops to the newest gadgets and consumer electronics. Alex’s blog simplifies complex technological concepts into easy-to-understand language, providing insights into the tech world. Furthermore, he shares useful tips and tricks for maximizing the use of devices and staying abreast of the most recent trends. Alex’s unwavering commitment to educating his readers about the ever-evolving realm of tech has made him a respected and trustworthy figure in the tech community.
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