Powerful eCommerce hosting you can rely on

eCommerce hosting is the core of your website's infrastructure. It is the service that stores your site's data, such as text, images and videos, and makes them available on the Internet. Your site data is stored by the hosting provider in servers. When someone clicks a link to your online store or types your website address in a browser, your computer retrieves your site data from the server and displays the web page on the screen.

The best eCommerce hosting site will allow you to handle the holiday traffic surges that online stores are prone to without worrying about downtime, security breaches or slow loading times that chase away customers. In addition, your hosting for e-Commerce should be scalable to grow with you as your traffic and sales increase.

For these reasons, Wix's fully managed, multi-cloud hosting that offers 99.98% uptime, fast loading times and enterprise-level security is a great option for online stores. It also comes with everything else you need to build and run an eCommerce website included in one plan.

You can host your eCommerce website yourself, but it is a complex process that requires technical knowledge and it is not recommended for beginners. It's best to use a web hosting service that fully manages your hosting needs for you. You can either subscribe to a separate hosting service or choose an eCommerce platform like Wix that includes free web hosting along with all the tools you need to build, run and grow your website.

When choosing web hosting for eCommerce, there are several factors you should consider:

• Reliability - Especially as an eCommerce site, it is key that your site remains online, even during surges in traffic and transactions.

• Security - eCommerce sites handle their customers' payment information. Therefore, it is essential that their hosting provider have guards against cybersecurity attacks.

• Performance - Loading times can make or break an eCommerce business. It has a major impact on SEO performance and conversion metrics.

• Scalability - Your hosting provider should be able to accommodate you if your traffic grows or if you just increase the amount of content on your site.

• Pricing - Hosting plans come in a variety of prices depending on what your needs are. Plans that offer the lowest monthly payment sometimes don't include key features, like data backup.

As an eCommerce business, you should choose a hosting provider that provides these pillars at a high level at pricing that makes sense for your business.

Yes, you can host multiple eCommerce sites on a single hosting plan in most cases, but this may affect the performance of your sites, since they are sharing the same hosting resources. One way to avoid this is to use an eCommerce platform like Wix that comes with free hosting included. Each site will be allocated its own hosting resources and there won’t be any affect on performance.

Wix eCommerce hosting has several advantages that make it the best choice for businesses:

• Free hosting - When you build an e-Commerce site on Wix, whether for free or on a paid plan, hosting comes included at no charge and is set up automatically.

• 99.98% uptime - Wix offers enterprise-level reliability to ensure that your eCommerce site is always up and running, even during peak times.

• Fast loading times - Wix's global content delivery network (CDN) automatically directs your site visitors to their closest server so your site content loads faster.

• Advanced security monitoring - With HTTPS and SSL protection, as well as extensive hacker testing and measures against DDoS attacks, your website is secure 24/7.

• Seamless scalability - Start with 500MB of cloud storage and 500MB bandwidth on Wix's free plan and expand as you need to accommodate more content and visitors with a Premium plan.

Migrating your eCommerce store to Wix is an intuitive process that takes just a few steps.

1. Create your new website on Wix from scratch, by using a designer template or with Wix's AI website creator.

2. Migrate all of your site data from your previous platform using the Cart2Cart app or migrate products manually using Wix's CSV template file.

3. If you have an existing domain, transfer it so that Wix becomes your domain host.

Web hosting costs for eCommerce can range from $2-$10 per month for shared hosting, to several hundred dollars a month for dedicated hosting. Some hosting providers give discounts for longer contracts and offer tiers based on the amount of hosting resources that your website needs.

Some eCommerce website platforms, such as Wix, include fully managed cloud hosting free with their website plans.

How fast your eCommerce site loads depends on how content-heavy it is and if you follow site performance best practices to help optimize speed. A matter of seconds added to loading time can potentially drive almost a third of customers away, according to Google data.

Wix allows you to view your site’s speed metrics directly from your dashboard and includes a number of features to improve your eCommerce site’s loading times, like:

• Automatic image optimization - Wix automatically resizes images for optimal loading time and quality.

• Content delivery network (CDN) - Wix features proxy servers all over the world that deliver site content to your visitors faster from the server geographically closest to them.

• Lazy loading images: Wix loads low-resolution placeholder images to ensure fast loading times and then replaces them with the high-res images once the site is loaded.

Picking a hosting platform with enterprise-grade security built in is key to securing your website and your shoppers' data. Wix eCommerce hosting comes with:

• SSL encryption - When shoppers enter their payment information at checkout, it will be automatically encrypted, making it harder for hackers to intercept it.

• 2-Step verification - This keeps unauthorized people from accessing your Wix account by asking for a verification code, sent to your mobile phone or email, when you log in.

• PCI DSS Level 1 compliance - This ensures your site is not storing your visitors' sensitive data, which protects you in case of a security breach.

• 24/7 security monitoring - Wix experts gather real-time insights to detect threats and keep your site secure.

• Automatic data backups - Wix automatically creates backups for you so that you can restore all of your data and settings in case of a security breach.