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In the early 2000s, Amazon took the limelight as an online bookseller. Fast forward two decades and it is the largest online store in the world, with a market cap of even $1 trillion in 2018. Of course, without Jeff Bezos' vision, hard work, and many other factors.

However, we think the one factor that really makes the uptick is a reliable hosting provider, the lack of which can seriously hinder the success of any online store.

So, in this article, I'll tell you exactly why your eCommerce store needs a strong and reliable eCommerce hosting provider, the features of a good e-commerce hosting provider, and finally the best you can use E-commerce hosting services.

Why you need a good eCommerce hosting provider

You can search for the best eCommerce hosting provider in no time, but wouldn’t it be great if you had a deep dive into why you need the best hosting for your store, and if you’re not happy with what the problem is??

Performance

Do you keep coming back to online stores that take a lot of time to load product images, or are you stuck on the checkout page and can't complete your purchase? Yes, neither do we.

That's because the performance of an online store is critical to a good user experience. A reputable hosting provider ensures that your website performs optimally, loads fast, and lets your customers shop seamlessly without any issues.

Since uptime is also an important part of website performance, a reputable eCommerce hosting solution ensures you'll be online all year round.

Safety

No website is more sensitive to information than an online store. For every purchase, you'll collect customers' credit card information, addresses, phone numbers, and other personal information that you'll never reveal. And, if your online store is hosted on some middling hosting solution, hackers may find it a little less difficult to gain access to the sensitive information their store holds.

Ecommerce hosting that focuses on security ensures that nothing happens. It usually has features like firewalls, SSL certificates, and login controls like two-factor authentication, which can effectively stop malicious actors from accessing your store's data.

Staging site

Anyone who has run an online store knows that adding new features without encountering some issues is not easy. Even if you're trying out a new plugin, things can go wrong in this case and cause trouble for your business. So, in this case, it is safe to test your changes on the staging site and when you are completely satisfied you can push it to your live website.

The best eCommerce hosting always offers a staging feature. Some hosting providers offer a staging environment as an add-on, where you pay in addition to the hosting plan. I would never recommend these hosting providers because staging environments are now a necessity, not a luxury. Whenever you choose a hosting provider, make sure your plan includes a staging site as well as your live site.

support

Running an e-commerce store means you have to ensure that most of your workday is spent managing your store and fulfilling orders. This may seem like a fantasy if you use a cheap hosting provider because while you're cutting costs, you're also compromising on support.

Expert support from a reputed eCommerce hosting provider for all your server and application management issues. It allows you to focus on the business side of your store, not the technical side.

Scaling Ratio

Earlier in this article, I mentioned how Amazon expanded its business from a bookstore to the largest online store in the world. A bad hosting provider is not going to grow with your business. Does not allow you to easily scale your hosting plan, which will prevent your online store from growing.

Modern hosting providers allow you to expand your hosting plans with the click of a button, multiplying your online store.

Key Features of a Good Ecommerce Hosting Provider

Scalability

Earlier, I mentioned the importance of hosting providers to allow unlimited growth for e-commerce businesses. Scalability is one such feature that will never let you go beyond your hosting provider. This means, your hosting provider grows with your business.

Providers like Cloudways let you scale your hosting plan as needed. Let's say you're running a holiday campaign and you want your website traffic to increase within a certain time frame. A good hosting provider will allow you to expand your hosting plan to easily meet that traffic and scale down after your campaign is over and traffic returns to normal.

Custom backup function

Backups are something that every hosting provider offers today. It is not common to have custom backup functions, i.e. the ability to create backups within the desired time frame. Most hosting providers create backups at preset intervals, but what if you want to create a backup right away before you make some changes to your site? Or do you want to create a backup before launching your campaign? Good hosting providers allow you to create backups here.

Clone and Staging

When you tend to start an eCommerce store, you need to make a lot of changes to it to see what works and what doesn't. Since you don't know anything about the perfect design or what works best, there's a lot of experimentation going on.

Experimenting on a live site is risky, so you'll need a clone feature or better a segmentation feature. Staging allows you to create an environment where you can make changes to your website without worrying about breaking it. Once you're happy with the changes you've made, you can push them to your live website.

24/7 support

The importance of good support was also discussed earlier in the article. A good hosting provider can take care of all your hosting headaches and let you focus on growing your business. That's it, right? When you pay a premium to a hosting provider, you expect them to take care of the technical side while they are busy taking care of their customers.

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate

I don't know if there is an easier way: SSL certificates are essential for your eCommerce store. Not only does it keep your website secure, but it also builds trust among your customers. As a frequent online buyer, I avoid ordering from non-HTTPS stores. I automatically feel that the data on these sites is not secure.

Most good hosting providers offer free SSL certificates from Let's Encrypt. This is a good option because I don't think you should pay for compulsion rather than choice.

The Best Ecommerce Hosting Provider for Your Online Store

Now is the focus of the article. I'll test three hosting providers and let you decide which one is best for you.

  • cloud road
  • WP Engine
  • Kinsta

Before proceeding with the test, it is my duty to tell you why I chose these three hosting providers in particular.

Cloudways – Best Medium for Larger Ecommerce Stores

Cloudways is one of the fastest-growing cloud hosting providers in the industry. It offers managed cloud hosting at a very reasonable rate with an amazing array of features.

With Cloudways, you can choose from 5 different infrastructures:

  • digital ocean
  • Linode
  • Vultr
  • Amazon.com
  • Google Cloud

All five of these infrastructures have different performances. For example, Amazon and Google Cloud are suitable for handling large stores. If your store receives thousands of unique visitors per day, these two features will keep your store running at optimum speed and 24/7 capability.

Additionally, in addition to WooCommerce, Cloudways offers app support for:

  • Magento
  • PHP
  • PrestaShop
  • OpenCart

So if you have a big store on either platform, you can host it on Cloudways.

Additionally, Cloudways allows you to expand your hosting with the click of a button. With DigitalOcean, Linode, and Vultr, you can scale up your servers at any time, and with Amazon and Google Cloud, you can even scale them down.

WP Engine – Best for Small to Medium Stores

WP Engine is a popular name in the WordPress community. They were the talk of the town a few weeks ago when they acquired another well-known WordPress hosting provider, Flywheel. From their activities, it can be assumed that WP Engine has a large arsenal that can be expanded to different horizons.

Currently, WP Engine provides eCommerce hosting for WooCommerce stores. It has excellent support that is available 24/7 to resolve all your hosting-related issues. Their expert-level support is one of the best in the industry and one of the main reasons why it is so popular.

Don't forget their powerful platform that allows you to manage your applications with ease. You can enable or disable multiple functions with one click. For example, when you create a staging environment on WP Engine, there are four different options.

Create a new staging environment

  • Create staging environments for preset templates with installed plugins and themes
  • Create a copy of an existing site
  • Move an existing site to a staging site
  • Earlier in this article, I mentioned how a transition environment is essential, the hallmark of a good hosting provider. WP Engine is a good fit for that profile.

Kinsta – Best for Small Shops and Startups

Kinsta is one of the newer entrants in the market, but that doesn't mean they aren't competing with the likes of WP Engine and Cloudways. They would rather give their competitors a tough time in a very short period of time. In fact, they are the fastest growing hosting provider in recent years while gaining a lot of fans in the community.

What makes Kinsta popular so quickly is its solid support and easy-to-use platform. Their platform enables even beginners to manage their WordPress sites. They built the platform in a way that makes it easier for beginners to manage their website.

The auto-scaling feature makes it ideal for small stores looking to grow their business. Kinsta's servers automatically allocate resources to each server when needed, so if your business keeps growing, you don't have to worry about running out of RAM or bandwidth.

So, which is the best ecommerce hosting?

I set up an eCommerce store on each hosting provider, added 500 dummy products to make it look like a proper store, and tested it on GTMetrix for speed and performance.

Here are the results...

Kinsta

https://tools.pingdom.com/#5b38607bd0400000

WP Engine

https://tools.pingdom.com/#5b38610114400000

cloud road

https://tools.pingdom.com/#5b38604aab400000

Bryan Osima

CEO Uvietech Software Solutions Inc.

www.uvietech.com


Without a doubt, the reliability of your web host is the most important

a key aspect of any business eCommerce setup.

If you have the best eCommerce website that is highly optimized for search, conversions, and sales, but your web host can't guarantee uptime or fast content delivery, you're basically wasting time and energy.

Every e-commerce store owner expects a lot of traffic, and sales, and their storefront is always online, as well as the security of the entire environment.