If you own an online store, it is important to choose the most effective hosting provider for your store, as hosting represents a basic criterion for the success or failure of online stores.
There are many companies and commercial websites that fail due to disturbed loading speeds, a weak security system for the online store, or even due to incorrectly managed web servers.
A question may now come to your mind: How do I choose the appropriate hosting for my online store?
In this article, we covered the most important standards that must be available in the hosting company that you can use to build your online store, especially stores managed by the WooCommerce add-on.
What are hosting services?
Hosting : It is the service that is provided to websites and electronic stores so that they are connected and present on the Internet. It can be said that the hosting provider acts as a web host for your online store by providing a server to reside on. This allows your site to appear on search engines and thus enable customers to reach your online store.
To learn more, refer to the article: What is web hosting? A comprehensive explanation for beginners
It is worth noting that there are dozens of companies that provide hosting services for web stores, and each company has a set of features and services. By reading this article, you will be ready to choose effective hosting for your WooCommerce store, and avoid falling into the trap of bad or inappropriate hosting companies for your online store.
How to host online stores?
The hosting service for electronic stores, especially those managed by the WooCommerce add-on, contains some features specifically designed for this type of business. These features may include a security system or free SSL encryption, in addition to support to confront any problem.
So carefully choose the hosting provider for your WooCommerce store in order to enhance the performance of your online store and obtain a satisfied customer experience.
The 8 most important criteria in choosing WooCommerce store hosting
When searching for a hosting provider for your online store, you must take the following criteria into account while making your choice. Among those standards:
- Integrated security system
- Automatic backup
- high performance
- Effective support
- Bandwidth and file storage
- Integration with WooCommerce
Integrated security system
Online stores are the first thing to be targeted by hackers, but why? Because online stores contain sensitive customer data, such as the electronic bank accounts they used in the purchasing process or credit card numbers, in addition to the customer’s complete data, such as name and detailed address.
Securing the online store is a very important matter that you can do or entrust the task to a web developer, but it is important to ensure the strength of the security aspect of your store’s web host. This concern arose because some hosting companies use weak server codes and are therefore more vulnerable to hacking. Where the hacker is able to penetrate the server and access user data.
At a minimum, your hosting company should be using payment card compliant (PCI) servers that keep your customer’s payment and purchase data completely secure. It must also include an SSL certificate, which ensures that all web-related communications are encrypted and locked.
There are many hosting companies that scan around the clock to identify any malware that threatens the security of your store. Here we recommend choosing a hosting provider that takes the security system for users on their servers seriously. Taking effective measures to confront and prevent any attacks.
What is new is that there are many hosting providers that have a good security system, such as Google Cloud Platform. This means you will get a top-notch security system.
Automatic backup
It can be said that the data of the online store is the backbone of the store. What would an online store be without customer accounts, sales numbers, orders and inventory numbers? You will have peace of mind if your hosting service backs up that data.
We talked before about the importance of backup and how it keeps you in control of your site and prepared to face any problem. Therefore, it is important that your online store is backed up on a daily or weekly basis. This is to protect the store’s stored files and database.
A common mistake in a WooCommerce store powered by WordPress is changing sensitive settings incorrectly. These errors may disable the store or cause damage to the database. In this case, if you do not have a newly prepared backup copy, you will lose time and effort to correct and address this error and return the store system to its normal state.
It is important when choosing hosting for your store that you choose a hosting that has a built-in backup service, and this will enable you to manage your business without worry.
In short, it can be said that the safety of your data in your online store should be one of the concerns of the hosting service you use. This will provide you with automatic backups that will prevent problems and address common errors without loss.
high performance
Statistics show that more than 50% of visitors will leave your site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. More than 70% of them will never return.
These statistics indicate the importance of using fast and reliable hosting if you want to target a large audience base.
Here we want to point out that shared hosting provided by many hosting companies is not the best option for online store owners. Many users complained about its slowness and constant crashes. This is not a good thing for any online store.
When searching for the right hosting, you will find many companies that say it is the best and fastest. All you have to do is carefully search for the best companies and make a comparison to choose the best hosting for you.
We want to highlight the importance of a Content Delivery Network (CDN) like Cloudflare. It is best to have it included in your hosting network as it speeds up your loading times.
Finally, your online store host must include a performance monitoring service and be prepared to alert the user in the event of a problem. If you find that your store’s server is slow, you must take quick action, such as contacting support or changing the hosting company if the slowness continues.
A WooCommerce store needs a lot of support and time to be effective and achieve your business goals. Therefore, it is important that you take care to make the right decisions during the first creation of the store so that you do not feel regret.
Effective support
It is possible for your online store to encounter problems and errors. If these problems are not addressed quickly, your store could remain down for hours, and this has a major impact on the store and customers.
Therefore, it is important that the hosting company you deal with has effective support ready to receive your problems in a friendly manner and work to solve those problems as quickly as possible.
An effective support team should also have web developers ready to handle errors to prevent any downtime in the store. If you used your host’s support and found that your problem was solved as quickly as possible without much effort on your part, this is strong evidence of the effectiveness of the support team.
But there is an important note in this regard, which is that you must differentiate between problems specific to your online store itself and problems related to hosting. They must be differentiated so that you do not ask the hosting support team to solve a problem internal to the store and completely unrelated to hosting. Then support may not be provided to you because the problem does not concern them, but it is worth noting that there are support teams for some companies that help you identify the problem itself and thus help you solve it.
So it is important when choosing hosting that you choose a host that has 24/7 support. Because you are vulnerable to encountering any problem even after midnight on holidays. If you wake up to a problem on your site, you must work to solve it as soon as possible so that it does not affect the traffic of your online store.
There is no doubt that good hosting is expensive, but low-cost hosting can be a loss for your product sales and customer satisfaction. As you will be exposed to continuous interruptions to your store, in addition to security problems, which the store cannot bear, especially when gaining a fan base.
Here I advise you to search carefully for the best hosting companies, compare among them, and see customer and user reviews for that company before embarking on the purchasing process for hosting that does not have good standards, such as effective support ready for customer service.
Bandwidth and file storage
Online stores need a large storage space to store a large amount of different files. Therefore, when choosing hosting, you must choose a host that has sufficient resources to store these files.
It is known that online stores include many high-quality images of a specific product. Therefore, with the increase in the number of products in the store, you will need more storage space for all those pictures that eat up storage space.
Finally, you should worry about your online store from a bad gateway error 502. This is a mistake that your store can make due to bad hosting. This results because the servers are crowded and therefore customers and visitors will not be able to enter your store, which leads to a lack of credibility.
So make sure that the hosting for your WooCommerce store provides you with enough large storage space to store customer data, order information, products, etc. Here we recommend choosing hosting with unlimited bandwidth and storage space.
Therefore, the solution is to choose either dedicated hosting, through which you will have a dedicated server for you and your store. Or choose cloud hosting, which works by connecting a number of servers to form a huge server ready to store any number of files. Therefore, you will not share the server with other sites, which will lead to the site being slow or crashing.
Integration with WooCommerce
If you decide to start in the world of e-commerce by creating an online store with WordPress, you will likely use the WooCommerce plugin.
It is worth noting that not all hosting companies are compatible with WooCommerce, so not all web hosts work effectively with this add-on. So you must choose carefully because you can choose a hosting that is not suitable for WooCommerce and find that your store works well at first, but you will find that it lacks advanced functions such as WooCommerce caching and others.
You should also make sure that the hosting provides you with Payment Card Industry (PCI) service. It is an extremely important service based on security standards aimed at protecting user data from leakage. So make sure your users’ credit card data is PCI compliant.
In addition to the PCI service, you will need to take many measures to increase the security of your online store. But it is possible to increase the security of your site by the hosting company you deal with, by providing the host with an SSL certificate service in addition to securing the servers with a firewall and using a strong server infrastructure.
In short, it can be said that a good hosting company will help you secure your online store by performing all the security measures that make your store PCI compliant.
The best hosting companies to start a WooCommerce store
In this paragraph, we will highlight effective hosting companies that are distinguished by the quality standards that we talked about and are suitable for starting your business project.
1. DigitalOcean Hosting
It is a hosting company that provides cloud hosting service to entrepreneurs so that they can manage and expand their online businesses across multiple cloud servers. It is worth noting that this company obtained the title of the third largest cloud hosting company in the world in 2018 because of the excellent standards it provides to its customers. Now the company’s data centers have spread all over the world in order to provide seamless cloud services to all users.
One of the advantages of Digital Ocean hosting
- A distinctive and smooth user interface:
Unlike many famous hosting companies, Digitalocean features an easy-to-use interface that enables you to access all functions with just a few clicks and manage hosting effectively and easily. - Efficient performance:
As a cloud hosting, it is characterized by high-quality performance that will increase the effectiveness of your online store. - Suitable price:
This is the strongest feature that distinguishes this company, which has seen many satisfied customers compared to other cloud hosting companies. - Active digital community:
This is a company-specific community to answer all user inquiries and provide support.
Read also: Steps to create and activate an account on Digital Ocean hosting
2. Google Cloud Platform hosting
It is a reliable and scalable service provided by Google and has won the trust of more than four million people around the world. It is a service that helps users calculate and store data.
Google Cloud Platform features
- Good pricing: Google Cloud is priced for your storage usage of your store’s files.
- Continuous protection: Your online store data is periodically encrypted by the company.
- Efficient work: The service works continuously and without interruption, and in the event of any malfunction it is treated immediately, and you can get your money back according to your monthly plan if you wish.
3. Amazon AWS Hosting
It is the most comprehensive and widely used hosting in the world. Its success amidst many competitors is due to Amazon’s strong management. It is used by many users, such as startup companies, websites, and electronic stores, as well as government agencies and others.
Amazon AWS hosting features
- More services and features: Hosting has infrastructure technologies such as computing, storage, and databases.
- Safer: The system was built on a safer environment to maintain the most sensitive site.
- Operational experience: With more than 15 years, hosting has gained trust and credibility from customers based on the most effective performance.
You can learn about the hosting of your WooCommerce store by the store’s performance in sales and customer satisfaction.
Now that we have talked about the three best companies for hosting online stores that meet the standard criteria that were explained, it remains for you to choose from among those companies after making a comparison and choosing the most appropriate one for you based on the packages and price plans of each company.
Read also: The concept of WordPress hosting and WooCommerce hosting and comparison with other types
Be careful at the beginning of your journey in the world of e-commerce so that you do not fall into the trap of bad hosting companies or those that are not suitable for your store’s requirements. Carefully choose your web host so that you have a highly effective online store and thus achieve your business goals.
