Besides the requirements of standard web hosting plans, Web
hosting for e-commerce operation needs a shopping cart that
supports online catalog and online payment processing.
Standard Web Hosting Plans
Standard hosting plans varies in terms of programming languages,
operating systems and server performance. The commonly used web
development languages include PHP, ASP, JSP and PERL. The
hosting plans that support those programming languages are
referred as PHP Web hosting, ASP Web hosting, JSP Web hosting or
PERL Web hosting. Once you've picked up the programming
language(s) for your Web development, you still have freedom to
choose the operating system that hosts your Websites. Besides
ASP which works only on Microsoft Windows, PHP, JSP and PERL
work on Windows, Unix and Linux. Hosting plans that support
particular operating systems are referred as
W
indow Hosting, Unix Hosting or Linux hosting. When
webmasters are talking about Web servers, they're most
interested in the server performance - Managed Web Hosting,
Shared Hosting, Dedicated Servers, or Virtual Private Servers
(VPS). Shared hosting is the cheapest plan, and you can host as
many sites as you like with a Reseller Hosting option. VPS costs
around $50 a month, and Dedicated Server plan will cost from $50
- $100 or more a month dependent on storage space and bandwidth
of the hosting plan.
E-commerce Web Hosting Plans
Evaluation of e-commerce web hosting plans involves
investigation of needed functionality and price comparison of
each plan. The comparison of functionality is straight forward,
but the comparison of cost for different
e-commerce hosting solutions is little bit tricky.
Different hosting plans may have different free structures. The
cost of each hosting plan often varies on transaction volume.
EBay Stores, Yahoo! Store and Microsoft bCentral are the most
popular turn-key commerce solutions for small businesses that
want to setup online stores easily and fast.
When comparing functionality, there're many questions to ask: 1)
whether a shopping cart accepts online check or eCheck beside
support on online credit card and paypal for payment options; 2)
whether there's a limit on the number of products and categories
that you can setup; 3) whether it automatically sends out an
email notification once an order is placed successfully.
When looking at the cost of commerce operation, you'll need to
ask questions about 1) what's the basic monthly subscription
fee; 2) whether there's a setup fee for a new online store; 3)
whether you have to pay for the addition of new items to the
product catalog; 4) how much it charges for each transaction.
High volume sites may prefer the plans that charge a higher
monthly-fee but a lower fee on each transaction, while low
volume sites work better with hosting plans that charge zero or
low monthly fee and initial setup fees but a slightly higher fee
on each transaction.
About the author:
Bruce Zhang has over 10 years of experience in web development
and managing web servers. He currently manages dozens of
websites using ASP Web Hosting, Budget Hosting,
Reseller Hosting, eCommerce Hosting, FrontPage Web Hosting
for
web
hosting needs.
