A big part of making a successful online shop is picking the best hosting provider for ecommerce. If you want a reliable, cheap, and easily expandable ecommerce hosting company, there’s no better choice than InMotion. Regarding how quickly pages load and how much space they can hold, A2 Hosting is a close second.
Our in-depth look at the ecommerce hosting market will help you choose wisely and get your online store up and running as quickly as possible.
We’ve done the hard work for you by making a shortlist of the top 6 ecommerce hosting companies and ranking them based on reliability, speed, features, and cost.
InMotion
Even with their basic shared plans, InMotion doesn’t skimp on important features like free SSL certificates and unlimited bandwidth. You can get unlimited space and domains if you don’t need the Core plan’s extra features. The fact that this hosting service got a 4.3 out of 5 in our study’s “features” section doesn’t come as a surprise.
With InMotion, you can choose to host on a shared server or a virtual private server (VPS). Shared plans from InMotion are a good choice for a new or small business. If you need more power in the future, it’s easy to switch to a VPS. The Power shared plan is perfect for running an online store because it has “E-Commerce Ready” features like one-click shopping cart installations and support for popular e-commerce platforms like PrestaShop, WooCommerce, Magento, and OpenCart.
All InMotion plans come with free solid-state drives (SSDs), so even the most impatient users can get their files in record time. Each InMotion package also comes with $150 in free advertising credits to help you promote your business on major search engines.
A2 Hosting
Our research shows that A2 Hosting’s set of features is average, with a score of 3.6 out of a possible 5. Even though A2 isn’t as popular as InMotion, it does have a few advantages. Solid-state drive (SSD) storage, unlimited disk space, and Turbo Servers that load pages 20 times faster make for a quick user experience. Even a one-second delay can cause conversion rates to drop by 7%, so the speed is very important.
A2 Hosting offers many different hosting plans, but only their WordPress, VPS, and dedicated hosting plans are best for e-commerce. But a shared plan might miss important things for an online business, like blazing-fast CPU speed and more traffic.
Using A2 Hosting has a lot of benefits, but service that never stops is not one of them. Even though it promises to be up 99.95% of the time, that isn’t a big deal. With a score of 2.5 out of 5, A2 was the worst of the six builders that were taken into account.
It’s common to see uptime guarantees of 99.95%, but you’ll often see much higher rates. Where A2 Hosting falls short in reliability, it makes up for its speed and customer service, so it depends on what you want.
HostGator
The ecommerce features of HostGator are average, getting a score of 3.3 out of 5. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t want to do anything. Each one has a free, unlimited FTP account that can be used to send and receive data between computers and networks. Each plan also comes with unlimited data transfer and email storage, as well as a free domain for the first year (although further renewals will cost money).
We gave this service provider 4.5 out of 5 stars because its uptime was so good. HostGator’s uptime guarantee is better than average, clocking in at 99.99% or slightly less than an hour of downtime each year. Since it’s impossible to guarantee 100% uptime, this is the best thing to do.
