subject: What is E-Commerce Website hosting? [print this page] What is E-Commerce Website hosting? What is E-Commerce Website hosting?
E-commerce - definition: commercial transactions conducted electronically on the internet.
Web hosting - definition: The activity or business of providing storage space or access for websites.
Web hosting and e-commerce are two separate functions. In fact, having your own website is not necessarily required for e-commerce. You could promote and sell products and services thru e-commerce using email or postal mail for example.
E-commerce transactions are most often performed by a separate website service called a Shopping Cart. The common functions of a Shopping Cart are adding & removing items to be purchased, calculating the sale total including taxes & shipping, then the payment is usually processed by another web service called a Gateway. Some shopping carts also offer marketing features such as mailing lists, automated mailings & customer surveys.
The main website issue related to e-commerce is the hosting capacity. Will your site be getting large amounts of traffic (thousands of page view per day) or will you be hosting videos on your site? Both of these usually require web hosting plans with additional capacity.
Even basic hosting plans that offer "unlimited" service are not completely without limits ( be sure to read the Terms of Service ). You may need a hosting plan that offers higher capacity than a basic plan, or you may need to upgrade to higher capacity hosting as you grow, but this is a separate issue from the e-commerce transactions that are processed by the shopping cart.
All shopping carts are hosted on their own separate high-capacity servers and should be able to handle any amount of orders that your site can generate. If you need to move your site to higher capacity hosting you shouldn't need to make any changes to your shopping cart setup.
E-commerce is one of the many ways to monetize a website. Other monetization methods are selling ads, collecting email addresses and customer leads, or promoting the products and services of others.
Monetization is considered to be one of the last steps in building a business website. A website must be properly researched, designed, built, and promoted so that it is getting sufficient traffic, and the right kind of traffic, to support the time & expense of setting up and running an e-commerce shopping cart.
