Online shopping has grown considerably over the years, particularly during the pandemic. To survive and serve customers, many businesses have opted for an online presence, replacing their brick-and-mortar stores.
Building a thriving online business requires a robust and reliable web presence. This includes careful planning, selecting the right platform, consulting with an eCommerce web development company, and choosing the right hosting service provider that ensures optimal security and maximum uptime.
Magento is a popular eCommerce website builder platform that offers a range of features and customisation opportunities. It can accommodate small businesses and large corporations like Nike and P&G, providing all the necessary tools for building a fully customised website for any online business.
Choosing Magento technology for an eCommerce website is not enough; you also need a reliable hosting service that guarantees safety, fast loading speed, scalability, and maximum server uptime. This ensures that data from customers, such as queries, order placements, and transactions, are handled without compromising the eCommerce store’s functionality or users’ confidential data.
Fortunately, selecting the best hosting service is straightforward. Consider the following factors when choosing hosting for your Magento-powered eCommerce store:
1. Hosting Server Performance
Performance refers to resource allocation, server optimisation level, stack, and overall uptime. Many eCommerce stores are well optimised but still encounter issues due to insufficient resource allocation, a non-optimised hosting stack, or inadequate cache to improve stack performance. This typically occurs when business owners choose shared hosting services, where resources are shared with other hosted stores.
2. Hosting Security
Online businesses often gather sensitive customer data, such as payment details during checkout. This information goes to the hosting server, making security a major concern to ensure customers’ rights and confidential data remain protected.
Hosting solutions must provide safety measures such as dedicated firewalls, two-factor authentication (2FA), and SSL certificates.
3. Scalability Features
Usually, an eCommerce store in its early phases doesn’t require the allocation of many resources and it prompts the store owners not to pay due attention to the future growth requirements. As an eCommerce business grows, more and more queries start to come in. It requires a platform and server that has scalability features and resources for sustaining the operations.
Thus, the scalability of the platform/server is a crucial factor that should be taken into consideration while choosing a reliable web hosting partner for your Magento-built eCommerce store.
4. Compatibility
Compatibility between the hosting stack components and the eCommerce platform is essential when selecting the right web hosting service provider. Powerful eCommerce platforms like Magento usually require a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL/MariaDB, and PHP) environment for optimal performance.
The hosting provider should ensure compatibility, allowing business owners to focus on managing their websites rather than worrying about hosting issues.
5. Post Support Provision
No matter how tech-savvy you are, there will always be issues that you can’t fix on your own or can’t find time for. If the server isn’t functioning correctly, you risk losing customers. Therefore, it is vital to choose a hosting service provider that offers round-the-clock support. When selecting a hosting provider for a Magento store, always double-check user reviews, as they can be helpful in making an informed decision.
