While low-end shared hosting is cheaper and may work just fine for many types of websites such as blogs, personal websites, & small corporate mini-sites, what it definitely doesn’t work for is e-commerce websites. To understand why – it’s important to know what shared hosting really is. Shared hosting combines multiple (and by multiple we mean anywhere from 2 to 500+ websites on a single server), allowing you to host your website at a lower cost compared to having a server all to yourself.
Sounds great, right? Not really. E-commerce websites require far more resources (like memory, CPU, disk speed/access) than a blog or personal website would require to run efficiently. Slap that e-commerce website on a shared server with 500+ other websites, and you have yourself a recipe for disaster.
Imagine that your company was just featured on the front page of People.com; and all of a sudden your website started exploding with traffic. With all of the websites on your shared hosting account fighting for the same resources, there is bound to be a bottleneck - and that bottleneck is going to negatively impact your bottom line. You will be faced with poor performance, slow loading times, and both lost and unhappy potential customers.
You may be paying $4/month to host your e-commerce website, but is it really worth losing $10,000 in potential sales when you could have been paying as low as $89/month for a better-suited hosting environment? Of course not; yet thousands of websites are still making this dangerous mistake!
Without question, the biggest part of running a successful e-commerce website is your ability to get your name & product out there. Driving interest and traffic to your website is your number one priority. And for that reason - your website must be able to withstand an influx of paying customers.
This is where low-end shared environments commonly falter, completely crashing at a moment's notice during a traffic surge that could have brought the company thousands of dollars in revenue. Not to mention your tarnished reputation as an unreliable merchant for not making responsible website hosting choices; which would have ensured maximum up-time for your valued customers.
In the web hosting industry, you truly get what you pay for. There are thousands of website hosting companies that will charge you $4/month to host your e-commerce website (a popular one rhymes with 'NoDaddy').
To make it worse, we’ve actually seen websites hosted on “servers” that are no more powerful than the majority of high-end smartphones currently on the market. Add to that the constrained cheap bandwidth (think of it as everyone at your house downloading 5 movies at the same time – can you say “buffering?”) – and this combination really creates the perfect storm when it comes to losing business for your e-commerce website.
Here's the bottom line: if you currently receive or process more than a few (3) orders per day on your e-commerce website, don't pay $4 or even $8, $10, or $20 for your website hosting! You are going to get exactly what you pay for. Low-end shared hosting will cost you more in lost business than what it would cost you to implement a proper hosting solution for your e-commerce business.
EndLayer’s flavor of shared hosting – called SPC & SPM – are high-performance hosting solutions that place no more than 18 websites on a single server. This equates to guaranteed top-notch performance and even room to grow when you need it most.
Check out our growing list of "Raving Fans" (satisfied clients) here: https://www.endlayer.com/testimonials