Internet Retailer Web Hosting

Web Hosting for an Internet retailer can be broken down into two main categories; website hosting and server hosting.  Each of which have many sub categories.  Hosting charges, required features, security, and reliability will determine what kind of hosting you will require now and as it changes in the future.

Website Hosting

Free website hosting

There are a seemingly unlimited number of free website hosting services on the market.  You need to keep the following limitations in mind when thinking about using a free web hosting company.

• Advertising - The site hosting your website will probably display advertising for other companies on your website.  This advertising can block parts of your website, advertise your competition, turn away potential customers because they are annoyed and reduce customer confidence.
• Sub Domains - Many times sub domains are used instead of your own domain.  For example if you wanted your website domain name to be MyCoolWidgets.com you might have to use MyCoolWidgets.MyFreeHostingCompany.com instead.  This can again reduce customer confidence but also cause problem in the future when you want to upgrade to a different hosting company.
• Resource Restrictions - There are usually restrictions on how much data they will host, bandwidth limitations, number of pages, etc...
• Supported Technology - Many only host plain HTML content.  If you want to build advanced features like a shopping cart, newsletters, order confirmation emails, etc, you will want support for back end scripting such as PHP, ASP/ASPX, or CGI. 
• Security and Certificates - Most free hosting companies are not designed to sell products online therefore data security and things like an SSL certificate are not an option.

Pay website hosting

Paid website hosting does not need to be expensive.  With every company comes different packages but you can usually find website hosting starting at a few hundred dollars a year.  As your requirements increase the hosting company can work with you to expand your services.  When looking for a paid hosting company you will want to keep the following in mind:

• Security - Firewalls are the basis of security and even most free website hosting companies utilize firewalls.  For security reasons you probably won't get specifics about the firewall but you should at least get confirmation that your website will be behind a firewall.
• SSL Certificates - Many people purchasing online will not even think of purchasing unless they're browser tell them they are on a secure site.  If your checkout is on your site (as opposed to redirecting to another site for checkout) make sure that you can use a SSL certificate to encrypt communications between your site and your customer’s browser.
• Data Access - Most allow FTP or browser based uploading.  You want to make sure the methods they support work for you.
• Database - Some pay hosting companies support databases such as Microsoft SQL or MySQL.  These databases combined with back end scripting allow you to collect and save customer data and are essential in creating custom reports.
• Reliability – This can be a big concern and hard to get information.  The hosting company will certainly tell you how reliable they are and most will advertise 99.9% uptime.  The problem is that they will still say this if they are not very reliable.  If they advertise a high uptime, ask them how they calculate that number.  If for instance they host thousands of small websites that never have problems but your site is down for a week they can still say you have 99.9% uptime.  A better way to judge how confident they are in they’re reliability is to look at they’re guarantee.  See if they are willing to refund you money for times when your website is down.
• Support – Before you signup you will want to know the following:
  • What do they support?  Most will support they’re advertised services and will not provide help if you are getting an error on your web site unless you can prove it has to do with something on they’re end.
  • What is the support process?  It is important to document this right away or you will be searching for this the first time you need it and not have the required information.  Additionally many only support email based support, some provide live chat, and others provide a phone number you can call.
  • What times they are available for support?  You will want to know if they provide off hours support or if you’re website is experiencing problems Friday night will you have to wait until Monday morning to get back up and running.
  • Do they outsource they’re support?  When you contact them will you get assistance from someone who works directly for they’re company or be shuffled to an outsourced company that most certainly provide a lower quality of a service?
• Exit process – Unless you are willing to spend quite a bit extra most hosting companies will have you sign a yearly contract that auto renews.  This is not necessarily a bad thing but you will want to know what the process is if you don’t want to auto renew and you will want to find out if excessive outages justify moving prior to the end of your contract and the definition of “excessive”.  Additionally it would be good to know ahead of time what the penalty is canceling the contract early.  
• Domain Hosting – Using your own domain instead of a sub domain gives a more professional look that increases customer confidence and allows you to move your domain to another hosting company.  As a side note make sure that either you register your own domain or that you are listed as the owner of the domain so you can transfer it later if needed.
• Backups – You will want to know if they provide offsite backups of your data and what the service fee is if you need to recover data.
• Frameworks: Also know as website builders are becoming more popular especially for eCommerce websites.  Many times they involve free and/or pay website hosting but many hosting companies do not offer this yet.  There are many pros and cons with frameworks that will take a good amount of evaluation prior to making your decision.
• Pros
  •  Built in shopping cart – If you don’t have your own shopping cart software or can’t design it yourself a framework with built in shopping cart software will be a huge benefit.  Every cart works a little different and has different options.  You will need to evaluate everything you sell to make sure it will work with the shopping cart.
  • Ease of use – If you are not a programmer or designer by nature the framework will obfuscate all the technical issues for you.  This is a huge time and cost savings as compared to paying someone else to design and maintain your site for you.
  • Themes/Templates – Most frameworks allow you to select a theme for your website.  You will want to make sure this theme can be changed and customized as your business grows.
  • Newsletter – Every Internet retailer should have a newsletter.  Many times your newsletter will generate more ROI than any other advertising you do.  If the framework you use supports newsletter signup and sending newsletters, all the better.
  • Blogs – Blogs are great for getting customers to your site.  Some frameworks have built in support for blogging.  Not just displaying and linking to your blog but subscription features like RSS and viewer commenting.
• Cons
  • Limits – Every framework has it’s limits.  For instance:
    • if you want to sell a t-shirt how will customers choose the appropriate size or color? 
    • What payment methods are accepted, such as traditional transactional services, PayPal, Google checkout, non-credit card payments, COD.
    • What methods are there for calculating shipping
    • Moving your site somewhere else – If you decide to move to a different company or upgrade to your in-house built site the website will have to be recreated and data re-entered.
    • Back end processes – Most frameworks are built to take orders not the order management process.  Some support exporting data to files or integrating with accounting systems.  Most will not perform any order management services and if they do it probably won’t fit your businesses processes.
    • Reporting – Most frameworks have some basic reporting and/or the ability to export data they usually won’t have nearly enough reporting.
    • SEO/SEM (Search Engine Optimization/Search Engine Marketing) – Although this is changing there are some “behind the scenes” things that can be done to help promote SEO and integrate with SEM most frameworks are poor at supporting these.
  • Additionally you will want to know the following:
    • Backups – Find out if they have any support for offsite backups.
    • Redundancy – Does the hosting company have load balanced or fail over bandwidth in the case they’re connection has problems?
    • Support – What problems are covered by support, what support plans are available along with associated costs, what are the contact hours and methods?
      

Server Hosting

Hosting company

If you are not using a framework and have outgrown shared hosting I highly advise using a reputable hosting company.  You won’t have to suffer from server performance issues due to some other website or the hosting company overselling they’re resources.  You will however need to understand the different types of hosting available:

• CoLo (Co-located Server) – This is your server that you purchase and locate at the hosting facility.  Almost always this has to be a rack mount server and you will usually be charged based on bandwidth, electricity, and physical footprint size.  This results in the most flexibility but you hold more responsibility for managing the server.
• Managed Server – This is where the hosting company provides the server for you and manages the hardware, OS, and usually a set of software such as the web and email software.  In this scenario they hold most of the responsibility for keeping your server up and running.  This is a good solution if you have your own website but do not have strong hardware or OS skills.
• Unmanaged Server – this is where the hosting company provides the server but it is up to you to manage this server.  
  Some additional things to keep in mind:
  • Scalability – With advancing hardware and software and decreasing costs this really shouldn’t be much of an issue anymore.  Certainly you will get charged to scale bigger but it’s not usually a problem for the hosting company to accommodate.  With that said, it’s certainly a good idea find out what kind of available bandwidth, electricity, space, etc is available and they’re additional costs.
  • Fail over – Do they have failover bandwidth and/or datacenter? 
  • Environmental controls – Is it guaranteed that they will keep your server safe from extreme cold or heat, water, fire?
  • Security – What is put in place to prevent others from gaining access to your server either electronically or physically, including they’re other hosting customers.
    

Self hosting

There are few times I would suggest self hosting.  Shared hosting is inexpensive enough to get started, server hosting it typically more reliable.  Unless you have experience hosting servers and Internet services and have a safe controlled environment to host your servers you’re probably better off paying someone else to host your servers.  The only time I would recommend hosting your own servers is if you can afford a good data center with redundancy and an on site support staff.

Pros

• Flexibility – The requirements for rack mount equipment and footprint size are usually not a concern when hosting yourself.
• Can be done on the cheap – A low performance server, bandwidth, and static IP address can certainly make for inexpensive hosting

Cons

• The lack of redundant bandwidth and datacenter
• No 24/7 support staff
• Ability to handle spikes in bandwidth
• Controlled environment
• Security