What is E-commerce Hosting
E-commerce hosting is a hosting package designed for customers who require a complete online business solution for their websites. E-commerce hosting providers provide the infrastructure, systems and applications needed for a website to perform online transactions. Hence, it has become a very important requirement of online businesses since it enables the customers to transact over the internet easily and more importantly in a secure environment. Thus, it is of no surprise that e-commerce hosting has become one of the fastest growing hosting services, looking at the rate in which people are doing business through the internet.
The most common features of an e-commerce hosting are shopping carts that are used for online transactions. This service offers a fast and convenient way for online buyers to manage their purchases and make payments. The convenient navigation and ease of going through the motion of buying products has increased the popularity and take-up of shopping carts in websites. From web developers’ point of view, shopping carts provide the ability to manage the complexities of web purchases in a systematic and simplified manner. There are so many available shopping carts in the market that it is normal for one e-commerce hosting package to include three or four shopping carts to choose from. Names like Zencart, osCommerce and Agora are among the established shopping cart providers, providing end-to-end medium for purchases to be done over the web. These companies would normally provide a 24-hour technical support to provide immediate response to queries.
The other must-have feature of an e-commerce hosting is the Secure Socket Layer (SSL). With SSL, the security of an online website is going to be taken care of by the hosting provider. Since security is one of the most important, if not the most important feature of an e-commerce website, SSL guarantees the peace of mind of making transactions safely. With SSL, private information such as credit card numbers, telephone numbers and personal information can be sent through encryption that is virtually safe from theft.
The other functionalities that are important to look for especially for beginners are web templates for an e-commerce website. It would be of great advantage if users can tap in from the ready-made web pages of online stores and forms for customers to view, browse through and select products. These web pages can be very complex to develop, and thus it would reduce a lot of hassle and errors of doing it from scratch. Web developers can always build on these templates to create more advanced add-ons. The list of crucial e-commerce hosting services goes on with features such as online catalogues, customer order management, data collection, inventory management and analyses on customer demographics.
Overall, for online business owners and individuals alike, e-commerce hosting brings a lot of benefits due to its complete package, from the marketing of their products, purchasing by customers, and collection of data to eventually improve the business. Web owners can expect to proliferate their businesses, contributed by the convenience, security and credibility that come with a full-fledge e-commerce website.
Mer Amer writes in Hostrecommend.com on various articles related to web hosting. Visit Hostrecommend.com for more resources on web hosting and list of highly recommended web hosting services.
What Exactly Is Virtual Web Hosting?
So you have decided that you want to start a website, or even an e-commerce site. You have managed the site design, and have even purchased a domain name, but now what? You will never get any visitors to your site if it isn’t accessible via the web. The only way to do that is by using a server. The server will maintain a permanent connection with the web and on the server will be stored all the information about your website. In effect, users will come onto the server access your website and then when they decide to move to another website they will access information from another server. So, the real question is, what type of server do you need?
For all individual users and most small e-commerce users, virtual web hosting is the way to go. The other option, having a dedicated server, means that you will actually go out and purchase a big and very expensive piece of hardware that will be used for your website alone. Virtual web hosting is, essentially, renting a small piece of someone else’s server. Virtual web hosting which is also called shared hosting, because it usually means many different sites are all located on a single server, and is vastly more economical than owning and maintaining your own server. But beyond just economics, there are a great number of reasons to use virtual web hosting rather than dedicated hosting.
One primary reason is downtime. Running a server is often quite a bit more complex than running your own personal computer. There is a real need to stay on top of technological advancements, watch for usage spikes, and maintain adequate bandwidth access. A server is hardware that must stay in constant contact with the internet if people are to be able to access your site. As a result, trying to manage all of the aspects of a server, in order to ensure that the individuals are able to access your website all the time, can easily be a full time job. A job which, for most individuals and small companies, is simply unreasonable.
Consequently, the virtual web hosting industry has flourished. With easy to use interfaces, individuals who have no experience with internet hosting, or building their own website for that matter, are able to set up an account with a virtual web hosting company. These companies also often provide one stop shopping services such as email forwarding, data transfer, backup services for your website in case of a crash, technical support, and often your own set of email addresses specifically for your website.
All of these features are ultimately designed for one purpose, to make the process of putting up and managing a website a realistic possibility for individuals and small companies that would otherwise find the prospect of hiring a full time staff to maintain hosting impossible. The ease of use and the affordability of virtual web hosting have harnessed the power of economic collaboration to provide individuals and companies with a practical way to get and keep their site on the web.
Paul Herbert writes about a variety of web development topics and recommends Net Explorers ( www.hosting-netexplorers.co.uk/ ) for UK web hosting.