E-commerce Hosting.

Purpose

When thinking about e-commerce websites, we think about catalogues with a lot of pages of products' descriptions, memberships, online, secure credit card payments and so on. These features require specific options on your hosting account. First, the disk space and bandwidth should be large enough to accommodate a growing catalogue and a growing clientele. Second, if you don't like to use an external credit card processor and pay the extra fees, you need to be able to offer to your customers secure SSL online payments directly on your website (you know, the pages that start with https:// instead of http://). And last but not least, you might need ready to use shopping carts, customer support tools, mailing lists, auto-responders, etc. A lot of the E-commerce Hosting requirements are similar to the All-purpose Hosting ones, in fact small e-commerce websites should also consider choosing an All-Purpose Hosting package.

What to look for?

• More disk space. Especially if your products have detailed pictures and the size of your catalogue is big and getting bigger.
• Enough bandwidth to cover all customer traffic. Here it depends on your success. A successful website will generate a lot of traffic, which usually means also a lot of money. So, we recommend a minimum of 500 GB of monthly transfer. If you're using much more than that, then you're making a lot of sales, and you should consider Dedicated or Co-located Hosting packages.
• SSL certificates. To have a secure https:// page for credit cards processing, you need a SSL certificate. We will not go into much detail; your website's programmers should tell you more about this.
• Additional, ready to use software. As with the all-purpose package, it's good to have choices of "one-click install" forums, chats or e-commerce shopping carts.
• Web technologies. Perl, PHP, Phyton, MySQL, postgre SQL, ASP and JSP should be available in their latest versions.
• Extra Features. Mail Management and Maintenance options are very useful for the marketing efforts.
• Low-Medium price. Your website's requirements are growing and the price for offering them is expected to rise. Beside the price of the hosting itself, expect to pay for extra options like dedicated SSL certificates, dedicated IP addresses, etc.

What we found?

Lunarpages has again a package that suits very well the requirements of an e-commerce website. The package is called Lunar Pages Business Hosting plan and it's built on their award winning Basic hosting plan. Their offer of Unlimited disk space has a limitation: the server space is to be used for business and personal website operations purposes only and not for unrelated data storage. This, in the end, is common sense. They offer a free SSL shared certificate (but it works only with html/cgi web pages), but for a $69 or $89 annually fee (with free installation), you get a dedicated SSL certificate. With a dedicated certificate your link would appear as https://yourdomain.com.

Note: the features marked as "available" are non standard and you might have to pay extra to get them.

About the company

With more than five years of operations and over 2,500 web servers running, Lunarpages is one of the biggest, most secure hosting companies around. They are so confident about their services that they offer a 30-days money back guarantee on all the hosting packages. The technical support is not outsourced and they can be reached 24/7/365 via email support desk or over the phone (toll-free number).