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It can be a bit of a daunting and seemingly not important task when it comes to choosing your hosting method for your website or eCommerce store. Many end up opting to go cheaper and settle for a shared hosting platform. Let me assure you that choosing what sort of hosting you are going to go with is one of the most important steps in the current modern age when it comes to your online business. Quite frankly, going cheaper or plainly choosing a shared hosting platform is not going to cut it if you actually want to look at expanding your online presence and business. This blog will look at what shared hosting is and the reasons that you should consider an alternative when it comes to hosting your eCommerce store.
1. Performance
Whilst you may have been promised unlimited sharing or sold on the prospect of a cheaper alternative to other serving platforms, it’s not worth even indulging in shared hosting. Many will argue that new startups should opt for this cheaper alternative as they have slower traffic and less demand but regardless of where your business is at, it’s going to suffer performance-wise when shared hosting. Despite promising unlimited disk space, more often than not, these platforms will share the bandwidth amongst all the users they have jammed onto their server. When many different companies are all competing with each other on the same shared server resources and allocation, it’s pretty blatant that the performance of your website is going to suffer. From an inability to handle traffic spikes, website bouncing and generally slower loading speeds, critical components of translating clicks to profits when it comes to ecommerce marketing are missing when businesses use a shared hosting platform.
2. Less Control
When you opt for a shared hosting platform you automatically lose some privileges. With every website and online eCommerce digital strategy having its own challenges to combat, you want your server to be as malleable as possible in order for you to make adjustments like software updates or changes to databases. To be able to make changes like this which are ultimately aimed at optimising customer experience, you will need access to the root (in layman’s terms, this is the username and password of the code so you can manipulate your platform accordingly). Shared hosting platforms, understandably, do not grant access to the root on their server for a whole plethora of reasons. This means if your eCommerce store and shared hosting are combined you have less ability to make changes and advance your service in the same way as you would if you were on a different hosting platform.
3. Worse customer support
It goes without saying, in the world of online marketing and eCommerce you get what you pay for. The likes of Amazon put in outrageous amounts of money shedding and optimising loading times. Like any service, when you pay less you tend to get less quality support for your money as the provider has less need, want or ability to pay specific attention. This means on shared platforms due to their vast nature their own customer service is rotten, directly impacting your business. Slow query responses is a
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main facet of these shared hosting platforms which can be hugely detrimental, as an issue during peak times for your business could cost you considerable losses due to the negligence of others. Your eCommerce store and shared hosting platform ultimately go hand in hand and when the shared host isn’t playing ball your business is going to plummet as a result. Alternatively, VPS hosting is like a VIP service where the business is treated to a one on one customer service allowing for a much better experience.
4. Security Issues
With a shared hosting service you automatically share IP addresses with others on the platform. Would you like to share a shop store with 100s of different businesses you know nothing about? Well, that’s the reality of shared hosting. These businesses could be scamming, spamming or attacking and the damage is going to end up landing at your feet sooner or later. Google could ban the IP address or more subtly sharing an IP address with undesirable websites or businesses could simply damage your reputation. It doesn’t matter if you are using rackmount servers or flawless AI tech, if your eCommerce store is on a shared hosting platform then you are going to have added security issue stress. It’s now an industry requirement to have SSL certificates and many shared hosting businesses will advertise that this is an incentive to choose them. As a matter of fact, these certificates don’t guarantee others security and do not equate to a secure server, which in the end goes to prove the plethora of security issues you could face on a shared hosting platform.
5. Efficiency
All the effort and time you’ve put into making your eCommerce store, aesthetically pleasing and functionally sound for a quality customer experience is going to go down the drain if you are to use a shared hosting server. The overall efficiency of these platforms means no matter what else you have to offer the basic experience is going to be badly hampered. One of the biggest issues regarding efficiency is uptime. If you have a strong digital marketing strategy to show off your eCommerce store you want that to be available as much as possible. The more uptime you have, the more efficient your business is going to be. However, it’s not uncommon for shared hosting servers to drop when high traffic spikes occur, meaning the downtime on your website starts to outweigh your uptime during crucial business periods. Availability and efficiency is massive in the digital age and it should be easy. It’s being made easier with AI automation, it would be silly to falter in your eCommerce marketing plan by opting for a cheaper shared hosting server which will end up actually being damaging to your eCommerce store.
Conclusion
Yeah, you might save money initially by choosing a shared host. Instead of $40 dollars a month you are getting it for $5. What a bargain, right? That would be wrong. At the end of the day using these shared servers is going to result in a loss of revenue well above the $35 dollar difference in your servers every month. It could cost your $1000s of dollars as your business becomes adversely affected by these ill-functioning cop outs. There are a whole host of reasons why your eCommerce store should not be shared hosting, but these 5 reasons are just some of the most important explanations as to why you should always opt for a VPS server. Trust me, it’s worth it.
