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Ecommerce Webhosting Done Right
Many eCommerce site owners underestimate the importance of having reliable web hosting. When the server goes down, several things start to happen at the same time.
1) No sales. – The immediate impact is that no sales can be made while the site is offline. Depending on how long the server stays offline, this has serious implications on your bottom line. But it doesn’t stop there.
2) Losing customers. – This is even more costly. You have spent money and resources to acquire customers. Now some of them will think that your eCommerce site is unreliable as it goes offline so often. So they stop buying from you. You may have just lost some of your most important customers.
3) Support emails. – Whenever your site goes offline, customers start to feel anxious. So it’s normal for some customers to try sending emails, trying to find out what went wrong. When the server goes online again, you will experience a surge in support emails. You have little choice but to respond those emails. In fact, you should do it as soon as possible so that customers know you care about them. This requires time and effort.
As you can see, unreliable web hosting can cost you a lot more money than you know. So even though some hosting packages may cost a little more, that’s completely fine if the services are reliable. You avoid having to deal with all the above-mentioned issues. When trust is broke, it’s very difficult to mend the relationship.
So how do you go about choosing a reliable hosting provider?
The key ingredients I look for are (1) good support, and (2) good reputation.
Having good support is very important because I want someone to be able to respond to me quickly when something goes wrong. For example, the email server stops responding for some reason. There may be a temporary glitch somewhere. But without having someone to talk to, there is no way I can know for sure. Reliable web hosting providers try to provide live chat support. This feature is very useful as anyone can get the assistance they need within minutes.
Reputation is influences my buying decision because you shouldn’t believe everything that is written on the service provider’s website. For example, every hosting provider says that they offer 99.9% up time guarantee. But from personal experiences, this is not always true. Some smaller service providers have trouble keeping the servers online. When sites go offline, haggling over uptime guarantee becomes immaterial. The damage has already been done. So I would rather sign up with a more reputable service provider. Someone who has been in the business for years, and know how to keep servers online. I highly recommend that you do the same.
