Regular Web Hosting Companies

Updated July 21, 2008

We have provided a list of hosting companies here that don't offer an Ecommerce Web Hosting service whereby all the components are included in the service (see Ecommerce 101 for description of the components needed to do Ecommerce).

Our review is limited to USA-based general hosting companies that provide basic hosting for websites and for shopping carts. However they are not a dedicated ecommerce web hosting company where you they provided dedicated services such as SSL Certificate for secure credit card processing, or a payment gateway for connection to the banking for authorization and settlement of funds or a PCI compliance assistance service, etc.

Regular hosting companies do hower offer very low priced solutions and expect you to be technical enough to run around and find the software components you think you need, and then, install them on the Virtual Host server that they provide for you and - YOU must do all the technical troubleshooting on your own, or pay for them to help you. Their fees, referred to as consulting fees, are often quite high and the end-result solution often disappoints most online businesses with what they had originally expected.

So here is our advice: if you think you are sure that you want to go this route and you are technical enough to get into this - fine and hence why we provide the list below. If you have doubts, then try an Ecommerce Web Hosting company that offers all you need in a All-in-one solution for you so that you can avoid the headache of integrating different components for your ecommerce site.

You may want to read the following articles regarding hosting solutions:

Off-the-shelf ecommerce solution vs. the single source all-in-one package