Understanding Ecommerce Hosting Features
A Home Business Article Contributed by G. Uma Bennett
Understanding Ecommerce Hosting Features
Launching your first online store is exciting, but it takes careful planning of your ecommerce hosting and storefront software to make it profitable. Start by understanding what the features of ecommerce hosting are and what they do for your website. The storage feature determines how many files you can have on your site. Files come in different sizes, most commonly "kilobytes" (KB).
There are 1,024 kilobytes in 1 megabyte, so if your plan gives you 600 megabytes of storage and each of your files is 100 KB in size, you have enough storage for 6,000 files. Remember file size depends on the application and the amount of graphic images in the file. File size will also impact the time it takes for your page to load when it is requested, the larger the file the slower it will load.
Check out Ecommerce Hosting Support before You Signup
Ecommerce hosting websites can dazzle you with generous free offers of shopping carts, unlimited bandwidth and storage and all inclusive features like domain name registration, but if you cannot get help when you need it from their support staff, all of this means very little if your site goes down. The first thing to look at are the means you have to contact support. A toll-free number or online instant messenger chat application plus an email address is a great combination, if they are valid.
Test each method of communicating with the support staff and see how well they respond. If you call their toll-free number, do you grow old waiting for someone to answer? The same holds true for online chat applications-when you login, how long does it take to get a representative online and how well do they answer your questions? What is the stated time for a response by email?
Another good indicator of support technical expertise is the type of knowledge bank available to you, is it a forum of users or is it simply a list of questions and answers? Remember, your ecommerce hosting is completely out of your control so make sure you have the support you need.
How Your Ecommerce Hosting Plan Affects Your Business
For an online store to be successful, you need a great ecommerce hosting play that will support the level of visitors you need to buy your products. Particularly in the early stages of marketing your online store, the traffic requests on your site will be heavy. Traffic to your website is where the bandwidth from your ecommerce hosting company plays a role.
Visitors to your site include search engine spider robots to index your site, traffic exchange programs to advertise your site as well as customers who are looking at your products. If you choose a hosting plan that offers you less than 5GB of bandwidth for a high-traffic site, you will find yourself paying extra for bandwidth every month.
Discuss your site and marketing plans with the support team of the ecommerce hosting company to find out how much bandwidth you need in your plan to operate your online store effectively.
