How to Choose the Best Provider for Your eCommerce Business

I have been working with a lot of eCommerce stores – a factor that is most critical for their success of the business is High-Performance Hosting. This factor is ignored by a lot of stores and is not given the importance that is required. Let me rephrase the same, I was in conversation with a client who spent over 200$ to design their logo and their brand. When it came to Hosting, they were choosing the cheapest that was available. 

I just asked them a simple question, if your eCommerce store is not reachable or is extremely slow where transactions are being throttled due to speed will it make you profitable? The clear answer was no. It was then they realized how important hosting is for the success of their eCommerce store. When someone is willing to spend over 200$ for a logo but is not willing to spend even 75$ per year for hosting, it speaks volumes. In this article, I will be covering the top benefits of reliable hosting and things to consider.

When you are starting an eCommerce business can be overwhelming, especially for newbies. Not only that you are always overwhelmed with questions like: Do I choose a provider that only offers hosting services or an all-in-one provider? Which platform do I choose? Is there anything I should know before I start my quest for the best provider? 

Today I will be discussing every aspect of how to pick the best eCommerce hosting provider for your needs, preferences, and budget. We’ll walk you through the benefits of having high-performance hosting, things to consider before you choose a hosting provider, and what are the check boxes that need to be ticked. 

Benefits of getting a High-Performance Hosting Provider

Get a High-Performance Website

When we surf the internet we see a lot of blogs where they advocate for a site to load within 5s. This is absolutely wrong. Today, the sites have to load within 3s – the reason why they advocate such 5s statements is simple, they are affiliates to a cheap quality hosting company. 

Some of more stats why you need a fast loading website

• More than 50% of your web users expect your site to load in three seconds or less. 
• Even a 1-second delay can result in an 11% decrease in traffic. 
• 46% of users don’t revisit a low-performing website. 
• 44% of online shoppers will tell their friends about a bad shopping experience.

Having a slow website can be detrimental to your business. It not just your website design what also matters is the underlying technology that your hosting provider gives. Minimum technology required for any website to perform:

• HTTP/2 (less than 30% of Hosting providers are on HTTP/2) 
• 1 GBPS Port Speed (Only 20% of Hosting providers are geared up to give you speed over 100MBPS) 
• PHP 7.4 with FPM (Most of the Hosting providers will just provide you with PHP – hopefully not an outdated version with FPM. FPM give you 20x performance on your PHP) 
• SSD Drives – Hosting providers who are giving “Unlimited” hosting will never give you SSD Drives others will mask their services like Hybrid Storage – which basically translates that your data is on SATA and OS & Web Services on SSD – in simple terms you are still on SATA drives. 

Read More: How Fast Should A Website Load in 2020?

Improving customer’s experience leads to higher sales

Profitability depends on high customer satisfaction and enhanced customer experience. For eCommerce to achieve a high level of productivity and profitability, dependable and High-Performance Hosting is non-negotiable. Customer expectation and experience have a real impact on the bottom-line as it affects the company’s ability to attract customers and maintain the existing once. This is especially so for eCommerce companies that have numerous competitors and substitutes as customers can shift to a competitor with a more stable and fast website. 53% of customers will avoid a site taking over three seconds to load, while customers who have experienced delays are 79% unlikely to make a repeat purchase. This is devastating for companies that are working hard to scale up. 

Customers can justify temporarily shut down for maintenance and upgrading. However, slow and unreliable websites usually turn them away. According to a YouGov poll, 80% of customers find consistently slow websites much frustrating as compared to sites that are temporarily down. It’s therefore wise for eCommerce companies to improve their site specs before butting their reputation on the line.

No Downtime 

When we speak to eCommerce business owners, apart from the frustration of downtime, they are more worried about the revenue that is being lost. Every second that the website is down there is a loss in revenue. 

For small businesses, that cost of downtime is in the tune of $137 to $427 per minute. And where a  company falls on this very wide spectrum depends on a number of factors, including industry vertical, organization size, and business model. 

Losing money is one side-effect of experiencing downtime. Another side effect is that customers will lose trust in your brand. If they try to land on your site and are not able to, they will most likely start looking for an alternative. If this happens more than a few times, they might stop coming altogether. 

Top Things to Consider When Choosing a Provider

There are thousands of hosting providers making false claims of being high-performance. We have come across providers who will never disclose their port speed or will use fancy terms like hybrid storage (their OS on SSD and Client data on SATA). In this section, I will cover the important reason and how to choose a True High-Performance Hosting provider. 

Port Speed – Bandwidth Speed 

We live in a world where there is essentially a need for speed especially when it comes to eCommerce websites. We have seen more transitions are happening over mobiles than via Desktop. Making the speed of the website even more important. 

When we do a survey of some of the brands that claim to be high performance, almost every one of them are just giving 100 Mbps speed shared between all the account on a server. Some of them have a 100 Mbps network. 

When you see how so-called bigger brands, have deeply hidden clauses where they throttle bandwidth speed. For instance, we were transferring a website from Bluehost to our platform via FTP. When our FTP speed was over 350kbps (yes, Kilobits Per Second) it will throttle the whole account, meaning the website itself was not available. With TDWS, we believe in providing high-performance hosting and will never indulge in hidden clauses like this. 

Let me put in the terms that everyone can relate to. When we migrate websites from a cheap hosting brand to our servers a website that has a load time of more than 10s is reduced to less than 2s just by migrating to us. Without any additional optimization.

Monthly Traffic Volume (Bandwidth)

Never fall for the false promise of “unlimited” bandwidth. Hosting companies throttle bandwidth usage if it exceeds a certain limit. There is never clear disclosure of the same. How, can this affect you? Say you are having a Black Friday Sale and as there are no disclosures about the bandwidth restrictions, there are no warnings. When you breached that level your bandwidth is severely throttled, meaning your website will be much slower than usual and will start losing your revenues. 

With TDWS, all our packages have a clear outline of the amount of monthly bandwidth. When you know you will need more bandwidth all you need to do is top-up the bandwidth. That’s it. You can be prepared for your sale without any downtime or a slow website that doesn’t load. 

Security

The frequency and sophistication of cyber-attacks has skyrocketed in recent years. E-commerce security refers to the measures taken to protect your business and your customers against cyber threats. 

Cybersecurity is especially important for smaller businesses. Why? Firstly, they don’t have the skills to detect a breach. Secondly, they don’t have the resources to make a security breach go away. On top of everything, a company may have to pay a significant fine for allowing the theft of its customers’ private information. 

That’s why it’s critical to choose a hosting provider that offers a secure website infrastructure that’s up-to-date with the latest updates, patches, and security protocols. A secure eCommerce hosting provider will act as a “shield” for your website and hold off most attacks. 

With TD Web Services, we take security very seriously. We have tier-based security in place. Having, Hardware Firewall for each rack, Server Firewall, and Web Application Firewall. Not only that there are daily/weekly scans that are done on all our shared hosting servers. Some of our competitors will charge you extra for security or scanning. 

Migration Services

You might be a newbie to the eCommerce business and are in the midst of starting your first site. Or, you might have an existing website and want to transfer your site over to a new web hosting service.

If this is the case, you’ll want to choose an eCommerce hosting provider that provides domain transfer services. Some hosting providers offer technical help to assist the website owner in transitioning their site from one host to another, efficiently and rapidly.

At TDWS, we offer free migration on all our packages. All you need to do is open a ticket requesting for migration and our support team will do it for you. 

Pricing & Flexible Contracts 

Small businesses with limited budgets often have an instinct to go with the cheapest option. However, the cheapest providers are never reliable and often it leads to opportunity losses. As mentioned before in this article, having a cheap hosting provider the losses will be a lot more and can also cost you your business. 

Keeping the limitation of budgets of small businesses in mind, we offer easy monthly, quarterly, semi-yearly, and yearly payments. There are no hidden costs like setup costs or forcing you to purchase multi-year plans. 

Read More: Announcing TDWS Flexi-Contract

Why Choose TD Web Services as your eCommerce Hosting Provider?

Investing in a High-performance hosting that offers a premium product is essential for serious eCommerce businesses. This will ultimately mean less downtime, better security and that will lead to lowering costs and increasing profits. 

Need for Speed

Residential internet offered by some companies can take internet speed to 1gbps. But what advancements have been made for server connections? I’m still surprised that a lot of hosting providers are still offering hosting services at 100mbps even a mobile speed are touching 50 MBPS to 75 MBPS on 4G. Why do most users go to such internet providers who are not able to offer a higher bandwidth? The answer is simple it is aggressive marketing, ignorance of users, and not disclosing information on their product/services page. Some companies will disclose the bandwidth speed when specifically asked for online support, then there are other companies who will not disclose the bandwidth speed.

Read More: Unleash the Power of 10Gbps Cloud Servers For Your Business

Infrastructure

Fast and reliable hardware is the foundation of any quality hosting solution. Despite the fact that hardware by itself cannot guarantee you an excellent website performance it is the first step in that direction. All hosting providers have got access to similar hardware configurations. Why TDWS stands out is because of how our infrastructure has been designed – ensuring high-performance for all our clients. 

Read More: TDWS Cloud Infrastructure 

TDWS GMS 

Avoiding Downtime costs a lot less than Downtime. TDWS Global Monitoring System is the way to keep a watchful eye on your lively hood. Not only that it can prevent downtime by reporting your website’s status, with it you can keep track of the user experience and monitor transaction steps. With pro-active monitoring, we are able to ensure that 

Scalability & Flexibility 

Cloud computing offers numerous major benefits to organizations, but perhaps the biggest benefit of all is the ability to scale your cloud environment on-demand. Scalability in the context of cloud computing can be defined as the ability to handle growing or diminishing resources to meet business demands in a capable way. In essence, scalability is a planned level of capacity that can grow or shrink as needed.

With Cloud being core part of TDWS Infrastructure, but that very nature all our offerings are scalable and clients can scale up or down – giving them the flexibility that is required. 

Pricing – Finally an Honest Hosting Company. 

We don’t promise “unlimited plans” that are actually hindered by hidden limitations. Instead, you’re only responsible for paying for the resources you need. Whether you’re just starting your own blog, or you’re running a powerful e-commerce site, we have a plan for you. We have the Lowest Account concentration per server.

We also respect your time. We’re not going to send you a hundred emails trying to up sell you on different products, and our website isn’t cluttered with marketing videos. Occasionally, we’ll contact a small portion of customers and ask them to respond to our customer service survey. It is important for us to continually measure our customer satisfaction by asking you, the customer, whether or not you feel like we’re doing the best job we can.

All of our customer engagement opportunities are strictly opt-in. You are welcome to receive our newsletter, read our blog, collaborate on our message forum, or connect with us over social media. We promise to keep all of our content short and relevant. Occasionally, we will host contests, giveaways, and announce sales.

Expert Support – No Outsourcing  

Service Beyond Support means that our entire team is invested in creating a better experience for your business. Have an issue? Have a question? Need someone to bounce an idea off? For us, service is much bigger than support. It starts before you are a customer and transcends the typical structure for something better. We have a team of knowledgeable staff and engineers available 24/7/365 to help you with whatever you may need. We do not outsource our support to any third parties, so you will always be in contact with one of our staff members.