However, the line has begun to blur. Much of ecommerce hosting, is simply shopping cart companies that have integrated the hosting and cart into a single system; with the two halves being inseparable.  This is very popular approach to running a store online for the reasons of speed, support, cheaper short & long-term costs, zero maintenance at 0 cost, automatic upgrades, etc…  But you can check out our shopping cart guide for more.

The short of it is, if you plan to install a shopping cart on a host, most any host will do fine.  The term “ecommerce hosting” is pretty much a dead term, at least in the way it used to be used.  We do recommend specific hosts for certain shopping carts which seem to have compatibility issues with lots of hosts.

So where did the term “ecommerce hosting” originate?  Plans in which the hosting company give you the shopping cart for free or for a discount is a very bad idea, and that business model is virtually dead, and given way to other solutions. 

As ecommerce experts, we recommend finding the cart first, and then finding the hosting second.  You will definitely want to see our shopping cart recommendations if you haven’t decided on that part yet.

In reality, ecommerce hosting is used in many different ways.  Some hosts mean you get a free SSL (secure certificate) for running credit card transactions, or that you get a cheap merchant accounts included with your hosting plan.  But these are both generally bad ideas. SSL certificates are cheap at places like Godaddy, and merchant accounts are always cheaper through a company that specializes in selling them.  You can check out our related guides on those as well, as they cover the absolute cheapest sources for those other online store components. You might be able to get by with using Paypal (using their most advanced integration) instead of a traditional merchant account, but this is not advised if you are panning on growing the site big, as Paypal makes it difficult to reconcile, hard to get real support, etc...  It is worse if you are using only their Standard integration as it will severly reduce the number of people who complete the transaction on your site.

Ecommerce hosts place an emphasis on uptime.   Having a website that is down for a day can easily result in the loss of hundreds, or thousands of dollars in sales.  Different websites have varying customer traffic needs, database sizes and payment limitations. Most hosts offer uptime guarantees, but few, if any, know their actual uptime.  Actual performance history is so much more important than promised refund on hosting fees, should the site go down.  Our user reviews are often the most helpful in weeding out hosts with poor track records.

When in doubt, check out what our users have to say. Being that they have actually used these hosts, this gives them a clear insight as to what you can really expect from each hosting company.

As hardened ecommerce experts, we recommend reading our in-depth guides into choosing the absolute best, and lowest cost ways to run an online store / shopping cart.