Choosing a webhost for your ecommerce business

Choosing a webhost for your ecommerce startup is an often overlooked part of starting a new business, given everything else going on – marketing plan, business plan, sorting out suppliers, choosing the right shopping cart software and vendors and so on. You need to be careful to not cut corners. Imagine buying a brand new BMW, but putting the cheapest tires you could find on it. That’s more or less the same as putting your website onto a cheap webhost.

There’s a few things you need to consider when choosing a webhost:

• Is the webhost secure? Do you want to be the person with your customers credit card information on the internet? You may need PCI compliance which has dependencies on your webhost.
• Do they do daily backups? Some hosts only backup weekly. Do you really want to risk losing a weeks worth of sales data just to save a few dollars a month?
• Do they have the right technology to support your shopping cart software? Check with your vendor, they’ll almost certainly have a technical requirements list.
• Is the server fast enough? It’s well established that a fast site improves sales. Looking at other customer sites helps a little, but it could be in part their site is programmed very well or very badly. Review sites like Roarhosting are a good way to try and pick the winners from the losers
• What’s the support like? Imagine your website is down, and customers can’t buy. How would you feel about having a webhost with no public phone number, and an email address that takes 8 hours to answer? Not so good I’m betting. Look at their support policy, and test it out before you buy see how long it takes them respond to a test issue.

If you take care of the points on this list you should be well on your way to finding a quality web host that is worthy of your ecommerce master piece!