ECommerce Business Technology Series, Part V – Hosting Your Online Store

In my last post, ECommerce Business Technology Series, Part IV – Shopping Carts And Your Online Store, I covered shopping cart integration, and making the shopping cart the centerpiece of your online store.  I covered all-in-one solutions versus self-hosted carts.  In this post,  I am going to talk briefly on the types of hosting most commonly available, and some thoughts about each type.

Hosting for your online store is not really that much different from other web hosting when it comes to hosting plans, and web servers.  The difference really comes down to the size of your online store, the traffic your site gets, your technical skills, and your budget.  Plans run from simple shared hosting servers to dedicated servers . 

A shared web hosting service is where many websites reside on one web server connected to the Internet. Each site “sits” on its own partition, or section on the server to keep it separate from other sites. This is generally the most economical option for hosting, as many people share the overall cost of server maintenance. The biggest problem with this hosting is that you typically have less control over the type of software and scripts you can install on shared hosting plans.  For example, you may be able to run some types of scripts (such as PHP) but if your scripts need to execute certain features (such as access system resources or call out to other systems or hosts programmatically) you may not be able to because the host server may not be able to be modified to support these features.  This is typically to avoid server misuse as well as protect the other web site owners that are sharing your server.

A virtual private server is similiar to shared hosting in that multiple sites can operate on the same physical, server machine, but the server has been partitioned where each virtual server can run its own full-fledged operating system, and each server can be independently rebooted.  This is closer to having your own dedicated machine because in a sense, it is.  You typically control everything on your virtual server from managing it to making sure your software is installed and configured correctly.  But since it is still a partitioned server, you may not have total control.  These are typically more expensive, require a little more technical prowless on your part. (not recommended for beginners unless you have a development team or have a design team that has built and deployed your site for you. )   The big advantage is that you have more control. The disadvantage is that you have more control. You can really mess things up if you do not know what your doing.  Sites that have bigger technical requirements or require special backend software, or other custom features will typically use servers of this type.

A dedicated hosting service is a type of Internet hosting in which the you lease an entire server not shared with anyone.  You have total control.  You are just leasing it and storing it in the hosting provider’s datacenter.  This option is for those who need absolute control, have high website traffic.  This is typically the most expensive option short of building your own data center.  This is usually not realistic for most smaller and mid-size online retailers.

If you chose an all in one solution, the solution may have made the choice for you based on the plan you chose, or the size requirements of your store.  Almost all use some sort of shared or virtual server as this allows them to commission or decommission servers very quickly.