An eCommerce website can make you a lot of money. But being an online business, you have to be comfortable dealing with the technical aspects as well. For instance, you need to know which eCommerce script to use, and what type of hosting to sign up for. The hosting that you choose, depends on several factors.
1) The type of eCommerce software that you choose.
There are two types of shopping scripts that you can use. There are commercial scripts (which you have to pay for), and there are open source scripts (which are free). If you are buying a script, always check to see if the script is meant for a Linux or Windows environment. Most open source software are written for Linux servers. There are some that are written for Microsoft servers though. Both perform reasonably well. So it comes down to how comfortable you are with the programming platform that has been adopted. For instance, do you prefer to work in PHP or Dotnet ?
2) Bandwidth and disk space constrains.
Running a shopping site means that you will be uploading a huge number of product images. Make sure your web host offers you enough disk space to store all your images. Most shared hosting plans offer unlimited disk space these days. So that shouldn't be much of an issue.With more files, you are going to need more bandwidth. You can't scale your business if your website is constrained by limited bandwidth. Fortunately, most shared hosting plans also come with unlimited bandwidth.
3) Stability concerns.
Your eCommerce website is your virtual store front. If it goes offline, it's tantamount to having all your cash registers shut off at the same time. The site just stops registering sales. Therefore, you always want to sign up with a reliable web hosting company. Most hosting companies offer 99.97% up time guarantee. But don't just sign up based on the guarantee on the website. Always ask around to see if the hosting company offers reliable services. If there are lots of customer complains, that may raise a red flag.As the owner of a shopping site, you want to be spending time processing and fulfilling sales orders. You certainly don't want to be caught up with technical and support issues. So make sure you choose the right hosting company.
4) Fantastico.
This neat feature deserves special mention. It's a feature that is found only with Cpanel hosting. Using this feature, you can install free eCommerce scripts within minutes. All you have to do is to login to your Cpanel control panel, and look for an icon by the name of "Fantastico". Click on that, and a list of scripts will be displayed. Choose your preferred shopping script and follow the instructions provided by the installation wizard. Within a few minutes, your shopping site is up and running! You may then login to your website and configure the site.
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