Why Blueport for E-Commerce?Blueport.com

When it comes to evaluating your ecommerce hosting site options, you have a lot to consider. And perhaps the most important question to answer is whether you should host your own website or work with a hosting provider. This article from Practical eCommerce goes into the specifics of whether or not you should host your own site, and it makes good points supporting the merits of both options.

When examining ecommerce hosting sites, the point is that you always want your website to be running -- efficiently, quickly and securely. Maintaining your own server in-house can be more inexpensive and gives your business the control to make sure your site is performing as you and your customers demand it to be. On the flip side, using a hosting provider gives you access to people who specialize in servers, so if a problem arises, it will likely be able to be fixed more quickly.

More to Know About Ecommerce Hosting Sites

If you decide to go with a hosting provider, you should be aware of these options so you can decide which would make the most sense for your ecommerce business:

• Shared hosting: This is when your website gets space on a physical server, sharing it with other websites. Keep in mind that with this hosting solution, problems on another site that lives on the server can affect your site.
• Virtual dedicated hosting: This option still has your website living on a server with other sites, but it acts as if it is on its own standalone hardware. If one of the other websites on the server crashes, your site would not be affected.
• Dedicated hosting: Dedicated hosting would give your website and any of its subdomains its own server. Reasons to go with this option would be if you have a highly trafficked site or if your website offers audio and video downloads, which can require a lot of bandwidth.

As you delve deeper into considering Internet hosting providers, you will also want to know about their contingency plans should anything go wrong, as well as how their customer and technical support works.

Blueport Commerce hosts the entire technology platform for its ecommerce clients, including server hardware, maintenance, expansion, upgrades and secure, PCI compliance, leavgiving our customers valuable peace of mind. You can learn more on our Hardware & Secure Hosting solutions page.