From the course: Building an Ecommerce Website with WordPress

What to look for in an ecommerce website host - WordPress Tutorial

From the course: Building an Ecommerce Website with WordPress

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What to look for in an ecommerce website host

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- The first step to building any WordPress website is to find the hosting provider that works best for you. Now, hosting is non-negotiable services like wordpress.com can handle the hosting for you, but in this case, you'll need to find the host yourself. Your host owns a server, which is where all the files that make up your website are stored. You pay the host to rent space on the server, and you can also pay for additional services and features through the host. and with hosting, you get what you pay for. Here are some things to look for when shopping for e-Commerce website hosting. Avoid shared hosting if you can. This means other sites are stored on the same server as yours, and if that site experiences problems or gets hacked, that activity can negatively affect your website. Pay attention to server location. Files literally travel, so if you're based in Japan and someone in Canada is trying to access your site, it will take slightly more time than if someone in England is trying to access site files from France. Many hosts will show you where your server actually is, so make sure that it's closer to your users. Identify what kind of support you may need and will have access to. E-commerce Site problems can cost you much more money than just a blog or a brochure website. If your team isn't very website savvy, make sure you have a direct line to support through your host. How quickly your website loads is extremely important for e-commerce sites and speed begins at the server level. E-commerce sites often contain a lot of data and high quality images, so it's important that your hosting plan is equipped with the resources to support those files. No host has zero downtime ever. Things happen, it's like moving into a new apartment and expecting that nothing will ever need to be fixed, it's unrealistic. Sometimes the host servers might go down briefly for any number of reasons. Many hosts will list the percentage of time their servers have gone down within a certain timeframe, and you want to look for as little as possible. While information like credit card numbers are not ever stored in WordPress files on the server, security is still a massive priority. You're taking in names, email addresses, physical addresses, and potentially other sensitive data, and you have a responsibility to keep this information safe. The host you pick should provide you with an SSL certificate. This adds an extra layer of encryption to your site These days, they're not only important for site security, but Google actively penalizes sites without them in search results. It's important for you as an e-commerce retailer to meet PCI compliance standards. These standards protect customer information. A strong choice for an e-commerce host will ensure PCI compliance and list that as a feature on their marketing pages. So when you're shopping around, look for mention of PCI compliance, that way the host will take care of those regulations for you. We will talk more about PCI compliance in the security video. Backups are a very important part of the website management process. While off server backups are a good idea, your host should provide options to take automatic backups for you. E-commerce websites contain a lot of files, product pages, customer information, images. You want to make sure that the resources your host has can support a large website. And it's also a good idea to look at the next size up in terms of storage, just in case you want to graduate to that one as your store grows.

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