Are you looking to start your online store?
If yes, apart from many other things, hosting is one of the most crucial decisions which can have a significant impact on the success of your e-commerce website.
There are hundreds of hosting providers available in the market, but only a handful of them are worth investing in.
So, how to find/select the best from the lot?
Here are a few selection parameters you should consider before choosing a hosting service provider for your e-commerce website:
Bandwidth: The amount of traffic a site can handle is determined by the bandwidth. Ecommerce websites need strong bandwidth to hold high traffic smoothly
Web Space: Webspace is an important parameter while choosing hosting for your website. Heavier your website is, the more web space it requires to store various files
Uptime: If you are running an e-commerce site, it must stay alive 24/7. Most of the hosting providers guarantee 99.99% of uptime in a year
Customer Support: If a hosting provider is willing to take its customer’s issues on priority and resolve them quickly, you can save your valuable time and money
Backup: A regular backup ensures that your hard work can be easily restored if lost due to some reason. Check whether your hosting provider offers free daily/weekly backup facility
10 Best Hosting for Ecommerce Site
If you haven’t built your e-commerce platform yet and are looking for an ideal hosting platform for your website to start with, here are the best hosting providers tailor-made for your e-commerce requirements and meet all the above-mentioned selection parameters.
1. Bluehost
Founded in 2003, Bluehost stood out from the crowd in the hosting industry and let you install WordPress in a single click and fully customize your e-commerce website.
It relies mainly on its data, customer support, and the overall experience with respect to the features it offers to its customers.
In recent years, Bluehost’s uptime with 99.99% and loading time with 405 ms has remained the best among its competitors in the market.
Bluehost will not burn your pockets as its introductory pricing is worth the features it offers with good security options, including the free SSL certificate with each plan.
Here are some of the hosting plans offered by Bluehost:
- Basic – $3.95 per month
- Plus – $5.95 per month
- Choice Plus – $6.95 per month
- Pro – $13.95 per month
Pros
- Bluehost guarantees a decent uptime of 99.99% which is vital for an online store
- In case you are not satisfied with the service, you can get a refund within 30-days of your purchase
- The platform comes with a 24/7 expert support via call, chats, and email
- It offers good security from malware, and spam and hack issues are very rare with Bluehost
Cons
- Storage is low on the basic plans as compared to some of its competitors
2. InMotionHosting
InMotionHosting is an industry leader when it comes to e-commerce hosting providers and has been in space since 2001.
It is ideal for your e-commerce requirements, as it has active partnerships with Prestashop, an open-source e-commerce solution, and many other top e-commerce services.
Apart from this, it gives you an added advantage of easy integrations with payment processors, which is otherwise quite tricky and a painful process.
Plus, their support staff is capable of answering all your queries as they undergo 160 hours of customer support training before they start working.
It offers three different hosting plans listed below:
- Launch – $6.39 per month
- Power – $8.49 per month
- Pro – $14.71 per month
You can opt for the Power shared plan, which comes eCommerce-ready so you can start pretty easily.
Pros
- It offers free one-click installation of more than 400 applications
- The platform provides a one-click backup and restore facility
- All plans come with the 90-day money-back guarantee
- In all the plans, you get a 24/7 US-based customer support
- A free and easy website migration service facility is present along with drag and drop website builder
Cons
- Hosting is a bit costly as compared to other hosting providers in the market
- CDN is not available
3. Hostgator
Hostgator is one of the leading web hosting solutions provider with unmetered disk space and bandwidth features.
It has been around for more than ten years and has gained a certain level of trust and respect among its customers through consistent reliability and a large number of servers.
Hostgator is hugely popular for its shared hosting plans, and trust me, it is worth investing in, but it also offers decent dedicated hosting and VPS hosting options in case you are looking to scale your website to the next level.
Hostgator offers three hosting plans to choose from including:
- Starter Plan – $5.95 per month
- Standard Plan – $7.95 per month
- Business Plan – $9.95 per month
Pros
- Shopping carts and payment gateways are available on all its hosting plans
- It offers free website migration from other hosting platforms to Hostgator
- It provides 24/7/365 customer assistance to its users
- It is known for its uptime which is best in the industry with 99.99%
- All their hosting plans come with a 45-day money-back guarantee
Cons
- It does not have woocommerce specific hosting plans
- It has limited dedicated server configuration options
4. A2Hosting
A2Hosting is one of the best e-commerce hosting providers considering the features it offers, disk space, and customer support.
It came into existence in 2001 and since then remained a favorite option among those who are looking for a fast web hosting service at cheap pricing.
Don’t worry about your website once it starts growing as A2Hosting has the ability to scale your website once the visitors start pouring in.
With excellent speed, friendly customer service, liberal refund policy, plentiful security features, and an environment-friendly approach, A2Hosting is worth investing your money in.
It offers four different hosting plans, including:
- Shared Hosting: $3.92 per month
- Reseller Hosting: $13.19 per month
- VPS Hosting: $5.00 per month
- Dedicated Hosting: $99.59 per month
You can start with A2Hosting’s shared plan initially, and as your website grows big, you can switch to VPS hosting.
Pros
- It offers one-click installations for most of the e-commerce platforms
- A2Hosting promises a 99.95% uptime commitment
- Turbo servers allow twenty times faster page loading
- Daily backups are offered for your website
- A 24/7 customer support is present via live chat, email, phone, along with a searchable knowledgebase with helpful articles which can be accessed anytime
Cons
- While 99.95% uptime commitment is much better, but clearly not the best
- In some cases, the site migration is not free of cost
5. SiteGround
SiteGround is one of the most trusted platforms for e-commerce hosting with more than 2,000,000 domains and a customer satisfaction rate of 98%.
It offers multiple hosting options to its users, such as WordPress hosting, cloud hosting, and dedicated servers.
With 99.99% of uptime and 673 ms of speed, Siteground ranks at the top of all the hosting companies.
Apart from that, Siteground offers free CDN, SSL certificates, and email accounts with all the plans it offers.
Also, its knowledgeable customer support team is available 24/7 to help and guide you at every step.
SiteGround offers three plans under its Woocommerce Hosting package which include:
- Startup – $3.95 per month
- Growbig – $5.95 per month
- GoGeek – $11.95 per month
Pros
- Along with free shopping carts installation, SiteGround’s e-commerce plans also include free eShop transfer
- Multiple server locations across three continents including North America, Europe, and Asia provide better website speed
- They have the best rated, fast and multi-skilled customer support
- It has multiple server locations across
- It offers free daily backups for your website along with on-demand instant backups facility
- Siteground guarantees 99.89% of uptime which is great
Cons
- Disc space is low on basic plans
6. DreamHost
Being one of the oldest hosting providers in the industry, Dreamhost has built a level of trust in the audience with an impressive security measure compared to other hosting providers.
It offers a decent 99.94% uptime along with 648 ms of page loading speed.
Though, the customer support and website migrations can be an issue with Dreamhost, it gets covered with an amazing 97-day money-back guarantee.
That’s a whopping three+ month which shows that DreamHost is really concerned about the satisfaction level and happiness of its users. The only exception is that only payment made from credit cards will be eligible for the refunds.
Dreamhost offers three hosting plans to choose from including:
- Shared Starter – $2.59 per month
- DreamPress – $16.95 per month
- VPS – $13.75 per month
Pros
- It offers free daily backup for your website in case of any data loss
- It offers unlimited traffic with all the plans, and hence you won’t be charged extra for exceeding certain bandwidth
- It offers a 97-day money-back guarantee which is available only for credit and debit card payments made for shared hosting plans
Cons
- The customer support does not include direct phone call
7. Cloudways
Cloudways has the world’s leading network of data centers located across five continents.
It has a simplified approach to web hosting and its flexible pricing model makes it an excellent choice for small and medium businesses having limited budget.
The hosting provider is more popular for the WordPress hosting as it offers all that you need to run a WordPress site effortlessly, such as backups, one-click SSL installation, HTTPS redirects, etc.
It has partnered with five cloud providers, including AWS, Google Cloud, Digital Ocean, Linode, and Vultr, to provide VPS and dedicated servers.
Cloudways offers tailor-made hosting plans made specifically for Woocommerce. Please find the pricing plans listed below:
- $10 per month – 25 GB storage / 1 TB bandwidth
- $42 per month – 80 GB storage / 4 TB bandwidth
- $22 per month – 50 GB storage / 2 TB bandwidth
- $80 per month – 160 GB storage / 5 TB bandwidth
- $135 per month – 320 GB storage / 6 TB bandwidth
- $230 per month – 640 GB storage / 7 TB bandwidth
Pros
- It offers free website migration services
- All servers by default have automatic backups facility for Woocommerce stores
- You can easily migrate your store to Cloudways with the help of WordPress Migrator plugin
Cons
- It does not offer cPanel or Plesk dashboards
8. Hostinger
Hostinger is one of the cheapest hosting providers in the market.
As of now, it hosts websites for more than 29 million users in 178 countries. It has shown incredible growth in the past decade with the user base crossing 29 million people during this period.
It has an uptime of 99.95 percent and the speed of 350 ms which is no doubt great among the competitors.
Customer support is one of the most important parts in an organization’s success and Hostinger offers customer support in multiple languages through live chat, phone, email, and integrated Intercoms.
Hostinger offers four hosting plans which include:
- Single Shared Hosting – $0.99 per month
- Premium Shared Hosting – $2.89 per month
- Business Shared Hosting – $3.99 per month
Pros
- It offers a free migration of the website from other hosts to Hostinger
- It offers a single-click installation of WordPress
- Hostinger’s customer support team solve your technical issues 24/7
- It offers a user-friendly control panel development
- It comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee, in case you are not satisfied with the service
Cons
- You can use the live chat option only after you are logged in
- It does not have the traditional cPanel
9. GreenGeeks
GreenGeeks hosts more than three lakh websites on its platform and is powered by renewable energy.
This means that they will buy three times the wind energy credits to match up with the energy consumed by their services to power your websites.
Trey Gardner, who is the founder of GreenGeeks has worked with eight web hosting companies including iPage, Hostpapa, and Lunarpages and hence has a wide range of knowledge and experience in this industry.
It offers free domain name registration and migration services at no extra cost.
GreenGeeks provides three hosting plans to choose from including:
- Lite – $2.95 per month
- Pro – $5.95 per month
- Premium – $11.95 per month
Pros
- The best feature of GreenGeeks is that it is an environment-friendly web hosting company
- It offers free CloudFlare CDN and SSL certificate
- With GreenGeeks, you get a free website migration from other hosting providers
- In case you are not satisfied with the service, you can get a refund within 30 days from the purchase date
Cons
- Refund does not include domain and website setup fee
10. HostPapa
For beginners and small website owners, Hostpapa is an ideal choice for web hosting with unlimited store and bandwidth.
It has more than 500,000 websites hosted on its data centers available in Canada and the US.
It has a page load time of 705 ms which is above the industry standards.
Their customer support is known for their effective phone support, as they offer phone support in 18 different countries having different languages including English, Spanish, German and French.
Although, some users have complained that the Hostpapa’s customer service is a little bit dubious.
Hostpapa offers four hosting plans under e-commerce hosting, which include:
- Bronze – $19.99 per month
- Silver – $39.99 per month
- Gold – $79.99 per month
- Diamond – $139.99 per month
You can save 20% by paying for the annual plan.
Pros
- It offers professionally designed store templates to get you started quickly
- You get a 30-day free trial
- A multi-language customer support is available 24/7 for its customers
Cons
- Lower plans do not include backup facility
Conclusion
Each hosting provider has its own strengths and your decision should be based on the features or requirements you value the most. These hosting solution providers can give your ecommerce store a solid foundation with their best in class features and amazing prices.
Do share your personal experience regarding the above listed hosting providers in the comments below so that the whole community can be benefitted.
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