What's Hot and not in Choosing an Ecommerce Web Site Hosting

This is the few things you have to look out for when choosing an ecommerce web site hosting.

1. Technical support

Does its technical support function 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, all year around? Note that I will not accept a host which does not have staff working on weekends or public holidays. You will be surprised at how often things go wrong at the most inconvenient of times. Incidentally, just because a host advertises that it has 24/7 support does not necessarily mean that it really has that kind of support.

Test them out by emailing at midnight and on Wednesday night, Sunday morning etc. Check out how long they take to respond. Other than speed of responses, check to see if they are technically competent. You wouldn't want to sign up for an ecommerce web site hosting that is run by a bunch of salesmen who only know how to sell and not fix problems.

2. Reliability and speed of access

Not only should the web host be reliable and fast, it should guarantee its uptime (the time when it is functional). Look for a minimum uptime of 99.5% or higher. The host should provide some sort of prorated refund if it falls below that figure.

3. FTP, PHP, Perl CGI-BIN access

If you are paying for a site, you really should make sure you have all of these. Note that some commercial hosts do not allow you to install PHP or CGI scripts without their approval. This is not desirable since it means that you have to wait for them before you can implement a feature on your site.

4. Data Transfer (Traffic/Bandwidth)

Data transfer is the amount of bytes transferred from your site to visitors when they browse your site.

Don't believe any ecommerce web site hosting that advertises "unlimited bandwidth". The host has to pay for the bandwidth, and if you consume a lot of it, they will not bear your costs.

To give you a rough idea of the typical traffic requirements of a website, most new sites that are not software archives or the like use less than 3 GB of bandwidth per month. Your traffic requirements will grow over time, as your site becomes more well-known.