There are plenty of hosting providers out there, and many offer as little as £1 + VAT. Sounds good and cheap, right? But there’s more to it than meets the eye. Finance is certainly up there when looking at a new web hosting provider.
The limitations of budget hosting
Budget hosting almost always equals shared hosting. But what is shared hosting? Let’s go into a little more detail on the shared hosting environment. It’s a platform (server) where many different sites/customers are located. Meaning you share everything that’s on that server, resources such as CPU, RAM, and even disk space (the lot!).
This can be good if you’re starting out, but if you’re running an eCommerce store, it could have some downsides.
Limited Performance – More and more customers get put onto one server, and each site slowly exhausts the performance of the server. This can contribute to downtime- and if one site is affected it can cause the neighbouring customer to also take the brunt of the issue.
Limited Resources – Scalability is limited with shared hosting, as 100’s of websites get piled on one single server. This means there’s usually a cap on what is provided to you. If your site suddenly experiences a spike in traffic, you run the risk of exhausting those resources and your site going down- just when you don’t want it to!
PCI compliance – With shared hosting customisation for your service is very restricted. For instance, if you run an online store, you’ll need to make sure your server is PCI compliant. For shared hosting environments, it’s not possible to guarantee PCI compliance as these plans provide the broadest compatibility to suit the needs of many customers and websites.
The benefits of eCommerce hosting at ProStack
So what kind of hosting service should you go for? We recommend a Cloud server- which offers you scalability, reliability and performance. Here are some of the benefits of our managed Cloud servers.
Managed Migration Service – Each server is different and with our managed migration process we audit everything to make sure the migration to ProStack runs as smoothly as possible.
Performance boosts – No matter the size of your business, switching to eCommerce hosting means you’ll instantly see faster page load times. Assessing site speed is critical when moving servers and at ProStack, we make sure to monitor this with our optimised testing software.
Additional Security – Having your own server means you’re isolated from other customers which provides you with an increased layer of security for your sites.
Scalability – Load testing will help you determine whether you need to scale up your server. At ProStack, we offer high traffic testing on your website which will give you guidance when you need to upgrade your resources.
For further information on our eCommerce hosting solutions, take a look at our website here – Ecommerce Hosting – ProStack. We’re ready and waiting to chat through the most suitable hosting options for your business.