Updated July 21, 2008
Ecommerce Web Hosting is the means
by which small businesses can now compete with large companies for
200+ million online consumers, in US alone.
While large companies have the financial
and people resources to host their ecommerce sites in-house and
manage and build the necessary networking infrastructure, small
businesses can use an outsourced service and get the same, if not
better, infrastructure. The only difference is that with ecommerce
web hosting services, the infrastructure is shared by small businesses
for cost benefits.
Now small businesses can explore
new markets, seek out new opportunities, offer more competitive
pricing, and often provide much better customer service and support.
How does the ecommerce web hosting
service provide this advantage for small businesses?
The cost of designing, developing,
managing, and upgrading an in-house ecommerce infrastructure is
a very complex task and extremely costly. If an ecommerce service
provider can provide all the necessary tools and services bundled
into one package and offer it at a reasonable monthly service fee
without compromising quality, features, and functionality - then
small businesses have it all for a nominal cost of a monthly fee,
as low as, say $50 per month. That is exactly what ecommerce web
hosting services offer.
Now gaining an online presence and
the functionality to be able to take payments from customer online
is enabling even the smallest businesses to compete with big companies
since they too have access to sophisticated software and hardware,
backup redundancy systems, fast networking equipment, advanced Internet
routers, environmental control systems, and hence develop an ecommerce
site that can compete with big boys.
Key elements of an ecommerce
web hosting service
Disk Space - this is the amount of hard disk space
you are allowed and is used for the storage of your website files
and other files associated to your ecommerce site, such as any programming
modules that your site uses, add-on software installed (for instance,
blogging software, forum software, etc.), and logging and email
storage space. There are many ecommerce web hosting companies that
now offer unlimited disk space (since hard disk is quite cheap these
days) and this is ideal if you don't want to worry about disk space
usage. Storage space of at least 100 GB is easy to work with as
this is really plenty of storage space.
Bandwidth - this refers to the amount of data transmitted
between the Internet (your online visitors) and your disk space.
The more people view your web pages and order your products from
your shopping catalog, the higher your bandwidth. If your site uses
large files (video files, audio files, high resolution photos, large
documents, etc.) then you may want to choose an ecommerce web hosting
company that offers unlimited bandwidth. Ideally, you want unlimited
bandwidth service from your hosting company but be warned many say
unlimited with a catch, so it really isn't unlimited. As long as
you have at least 1000 GB per month, you should be fine.
Networking Equipment - ideally your ecommerce web
host provider has the latest and most advanced networking routers
and hubs that allow fast throughput of data with as little bottleneck
as possible. Additionally, there are ample ServerIrons, intrusion
protection, monitoring systems, and traffic routing to protect the
data and the infrastructure from hacking attacks and other threats
such as Denial of Service.
Networking Connection - datacenters now offer sophisticated
backbone connections with redundancy and protection against fail
traffic connections, automatic routing, and outage prevention. Together
these measures can insure that your customer can find your ecommerce
site and seamlessly place an order online for your services. Choose
a hosting company that offers advanced networking connection and
guarantees it.
SSL Secure Certificate - to process credit cards
online you need security measures to help protect the data during
transmission, since the Internet is an open system. A secure socket
layer certificate is a means by which your data is encrypted and
transmitted. When choosing a service make sure that the provider
is offering a SSL Server (share or dedicated) and this should be
included in the service fee.
Domain Name - most ecommerce hosting companies
now include this with ecommerce web hosting service, simply because
it costs very little (only about $10 per year or 80 cents per month),
and second because they own the domain since they bought it for
your use. So you can't leave them and take your domain with you,
therefore you must stay with their hosting service. If you have
spent years promoting your domain and have built your branding on
your domain name, it is not so easy to relinquish this asset and
walk away. Our advice is, pay for your own domain and own it and
keep it and take it with you if you need to leave. Your business
can afford 80 cents per month.
Website Builder - this is an editor to build your
website and is offered either as a simple open source editor that
is readily available or some hosting companies offer Microsoft FrontPage
or Adobe Macromedia. In either case these editors are used by you
to develop your web pages. Some hosting companies also offer ready
made templates for your website design so that you don't have design
and develop a website from scratch. Just add your information and
your site will be ready in a matter of hours, although it may not
look as professional as some businesses may want.
Electronic Catalog - a cataloging system that can
be integrated with your website for the purpose of displaying you
products in an orderly way and making presentation clean and user-friendly
so that a product can quickly be found, placed in the shopping cart,
continue searching the catalog of products and then finish shopping
by going to checkout. The catalog is very useful for companies that
have hundreds or thousands of products and must enable a customer
to search the database of products. In most cases whereby the online
business only offers 20 or less products, electronic catalogs are
often not used.
Shopping Cart or a Single Order Page -
this is a software that is used to allow the online shopper to select
one or more products and place it in their electronic shopping
cart and wait until the customer is finished shopping and wishes
to go to the checkout process. There are many different shopping
carts available on the Internet, each with their own set of features
and functionality, some also offering search engine optimization,
advanced shipping calculation, comprehensive tax calculation ability,
affiliate integration, promotional codes, discounts, live chat,
and many other useful features. In most cases the shopping cart
software is provided free of charge by the ecommerce web hosting
company so you are limited to what they provide. However with most
hosting plans you can also install the shopping cart software of
your choice and use the features that are most needed by your customers.
Make sure you check with your hosting company before you sign up
with them that you have the option to install the software of your
choice, without being charged additional fees. In some cases where
the shopping cart process does not need to be extensive a one page
checkout process can be used whereby both the product cart and the
checkout are on the same page, and hence a single order page complete
the entire process and offer extra simplicity for the customer.
Checkout Page - this is where secure credit card
is collected from your customer to perform payment processing. There
are a few fields included for AVS (address verification), and CVV2
(the code next to the signature on the back of the card) to provide
security during the payment processing of the order. All the relevant
fields of data are sent through the payment gateway and submitted
to the banking networks for processing and approval.
Payment Processing Service - or sometimes referring
to as the payment gateway is where the credit card number is authenticated
to make sure that it is a valid credit card number, then submitted
to the banking network to obtain authorization of the fund availability
and allocation of the credit amount to this order until the order
if shipped and settlement (transfer) of the fund is completed. If
order is not approved the funds are not available or not allocated
to the order and the customer has to use another credit card.
Manual Processing - sometimes your customers may
wish to order by telephone/fax (for instance they may want to add
another item to an existing order) and therefore send in their credit
card information for you to process manually. Sometimes you may
wish to offer telephone/fax orders ONLY to customer outside US or
a particular location. In such cases you would use manual processing
through a software (or an online interface) called the Virtual Terminal.
Internet Merchant Account - all merchants who wish
to accept credit cards on their website must first obtain an Internet
merchant account from a merchant account provider so that they can
accept and process credit card payments for their business.
Customer/Order Management System - all order (or
transactions) are stored in the transaction database so that you
can have access for validation of the orders as well as fulfillment
(shipping). You also may need to perform customer service and support
and therefore you need access to the database to see the details
of the orders, dates, customer information, etc. The management
system allows you to perform a variety of customer service tasks
and provides you with access to the information securely and reliably.
Reporting System - every business owner and marketing
person need to have access to the sales report to review the data
and evaluate campaign performance, promotion viability, future adjustments,
and overall performance and profitability. The reporting system
can generate reports that business owners, marketers, and accounts
wish to review and look at .
Technical Support - often the most neglected part
of a service is the support, and when you need support it often
means that things are not working and your business is on stand
still. Hence sales are not going though, system is down, and business
is suffering. It is important to find an ecommerce web hosting company
that provides good technical support, ideally 24/7 and with a live
person reachable on an 800 free telephone line. There are many hosting
companies that do offer this.
Secure Telnet (SSH) Access - this refers to the
ability to securely connect to your online account and securely
view your customer information, upload website, manage credit card
accounts, etc. Secure Shell is important service if you are connecting
from Internet cafe shops whereby no security is available in the
open system for all to share. Most ecommerce web hosting companies
offer this with their hosting plans.
FTP Access - file transport to your website location
stored in the hosting servers is performed using this software and
access is via a username and password which your hosting company
will provide for you so that you can upload your web pages.
Logs - logs are the record of your traffic and
website usage. With this data you can use a software that analysis
your traffic and can provide you with information such as what pages
are viewed most, where are your customers coming from, what search
engines are providing you with the most traffic, etc. so it is very
important information if you need to do campaign management and
tracking.
More Features:
The above list is some of the most
common features and functionality you could expect from most ecommerce
web hosting companies that care to offer a good service with ample
flexibility. However, you can also consider other features that
may be very useful for your business operation, and many of hosting
companies that we have listed for you in our review, offer most
of the following as well.
Unlimited SQL Databases - ideal for future development
of database driven applications, such as Customer Relations Management,
Forums, and other software applications that need to store data
for future access by you or your customers.
Multiple Login Accounts - if there are more than
one person in your company that needs to have access to your hosted
ecommerce systems, then it would be ideal if you can have multiple
accounts with varying security access controls. For instance, you
can have yourself as the main administrator, your webmaster having
access to website area only (and not the accounting, sales, and
credit card information), and your bookkeeper having access to the
accounting information (and not able to go to the website files
to inadvertently delete any files), etc.
Full-features Web Mail System - this would be a
mail system that provides a user-friendly interface (wizard or hosting
panel or whatever the marketing department of the hosting company
calls it) and this would allow you to manage mail easily and quickly,
as mail management can get difficult to manage quickly.
Unlimited Autoresponders - if you use this feature
in your business then it is important to make sure that your hosting
plan has unlimited use made available to you.
Server Operating System - whether a UNIX based
operating server (FreeBSD, HP Unix, AIX, or even Linux) or MS Windows
based Servers should really not make much difference to most ecommerce
web hosting plans, since many offer both depending on your choice.
If you intend to have many advanced functionality in your website,
consult with your programmers and decide which platform is ideal
for your needs.
CGI use and CGI Library - most ecommerce web hosting
companies provide you with a CGI library of scripts that you can
use on your web site and provide you with a CGI folder so that you
can store pages that you do not wish to be viewed by all unless
they have the authority to do so (such as a password file). Most
hosting companies provide comprehensive access to this but you need
to know what you are doing or else you jeopardize your site's security.
Programming Software Platforms - when choosing
a hosting company make sure you consider what software platforms
their server allows for your programmers. These days most companies
offer PHP 5, Perl 5. Ruby on Rails, FastCGI, and Phython. Ideally,
you want to choose an ecommerce web hosting company that provides
support for all of these. If the support is good and competent,
then you found a great service.
Dedicated IP address - you should insist that you
are given a dedicated IP address and in most cases you will be.
It is however harder to ask for a dedicated IP address per website
you are operating, for instance if you have multiple websites operating
in your single ecommerce web hosting account.
Free Forum Software - most good hosting companies
provide at least one forum software already installed and ready
to use without difficult setup procedures. Make sure your account
comes with one if you need this software.
Free Content Management Software - if you have
dynamic content, then you should seriously consider using a CMS
and since there are many hosting companies now that offer this,
choose one that meets your needs.
Even more features:
We can also recommend other features
that help make your ecommerce business more versatile for future
growth and scalability:
Free Photo Gallery
Full .htaccess Capability
MOD Perl, MODE rewrite, and other modules
WAP (Wireless Access Protocol) and WML (Wireless
Markup Language) Support
Free Blog Software
Free Site Builder Software or Wizard
Free Anti-spam Filtering Software
Free Anti-virus Software
Free Shopping Cart Software (ideally multiple to
choose from)
Comprehensive Redundancy and Backup Systems
Redundant Internet Backbones
Apache Web Server Support
Custom Error Pages
Server Side Includes
For ecommerce web hosting providers
the economies of scale (thousands of small businesses using their
service) assures that the cost savings for many small businesses
would still translate to a profitable business model. In most cases
these service providers are happier with this model since losing
a few small clients to a competitor is not as much a threat as if
they lost only one big customer that accounts for 20% of the company's
revenue. This is truly a win-win scenario.
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