Web Hosting: The Importance Of Support

We do not choose the hosting of our e-commerce site as we would for any other site. The hosting choice for an e-commerce site must meet a few requirements, including adapting to its operation and purpose. Due to its characteristics, it is important to select a hosting that ensures accessibility, security, and performance. These are indeed levers to activate to attract customers and generate a good turnover with your activity. To do this, you must consider not only the type of server but also the services associated with the hosting, particularly the technical support.

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Technical Support: A Criterion To Study

Many criteria determine the quality of accommodation. The responsiveness of technical support is one of these, even if it tends to be relegated to the background. Indeed, as qualified as the service offered by the host, your site is only partially safe from a hacking attempt, a system error, or a breakdown. These are problems that can be fatal for an e-commerce site because Internet users, ever keener on speed, leave to look elsewhere at the slightest slowdown.

To realize the importance of accessibility to the site, know that according to a Kissmetrics study, one second of delay time will be worth 7% less conversion rate on a web page! Technical support is the only one able to solve any technical problem that may arise on your site. It must be available at all times. Choose proactive support that can be reached 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to be sure to get assistance in the event of a technical problem, even outside office hours.

Also, choose the support that provides you with an agent who can communicate fluently in India to save time while processing your request. As such, the LWS web host offers support in India, for example, to ensure that the intervention occurs immediately after your call. You can test the quality of a host’s support by calling and asking them questions. This will already allow you to assess their responsiveness and efficiency.

Availability

Availability is the second criterion that defines good web hosting for an e-commerce site. It impacts the viability of your online store insofar as each minute of the outage is equivalent to a lost sale, especially if it occurs during periods of peak activity. Thus, the host must guarantee you maximum visibility (ideally 99.99% for the e-commerce site) by offering solutions such as manual or automated monitoring to detect failures quickly. Professional quality hosting should also allow you to take advantage of occasional backups to ensure the availability of your site.

Remember to check the commitment of your service provider to restore the breakdown within a defined period ( 2 or 4 hours at the latest or according to your needs ) by consulting the contract. He must also clearly display the availability rate which he undertakes to make you benefit from to ensure the availability of your e-commerce site. The standard in this area is at least 99.95% availability, but for an e-commerce site, it must be around 100%.

Security

Setting up an e-commerce site requires you to handle delicate data such as users’ personal information, which is the main target of hackers. Indeed, data theft and identity theft are commonplace on this vast exchange place, the Internet. Therefore, you must ensure the security of this information. Hosting also comes into play in securing the personal data of customers, servers, and web applications. To do this, the host must install firewalls, carry out intrusion tests and mobilize all the resources necessary to prevent security breaches.

It must provide you with a technical base and quality components and ensure that you have the updated versions, which are always the most secure. Your service provider must also ensure frequent and regular backups to protect you from data loss. Automatic backup is also essential to restore your site to its latest version if a technical problem requires complete restoration.

Performance and loading speed

Finally, it would help if you chose a host that guarantees optimal loading speed for your site. This criterion is important insofar as it is one of the parameters that will impact the natural referencing of your e-commerce site. A loading speed that is too slow will earn you a penalty from Google on the quality of the indexing of your pages. The search engine prioritizes the fastest sites because it considers them more “user-friendly.”

Be aware that more than 2 seconds of loading time will drive away up to 40% of your potential customers! Similarly, a consistently down site will be considered underperforming and won’t earn good SEO points. The host must perform load tests to assess the display speed of your site. Based on this assessment, he should suggest improvements to optimize your server and more easily resolve slowdowns when they occur.

The server’s location also comes into play in the loading speed of the website’s pages, so choose a host that has data centers in India or at least in neighboring countries. Note that this element also impacts the security of your customer’s data since the GDPR law is often in force in these countries.