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Secure ecommerce website hosting specifically for online stores.
Online stores require a more secure hosting service than regular websites. This is because sites that are designed for ecommerce, handle and store customers personal information and process financial transactions over the internet. Hackers are constantly attacking ecommerce sites and their hosting services. They are usually looking for credit card details, bank account details, customer log in details and downloadable products like music, or ebooks. Online retailers are regularly in the news because their online store has been hacked with customer details and credit card details being stolen.
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Your Online Shops ecommerce hosting is specifically setup for ecommerce and caters for small to medium size Australian businesses who require an extremely secure, reliable and fast ecommerce hosting at an economical price. Your Online Shop uses secure servers and systems that are located in Melbourne Australia and not overseas. Your Online Shop has deployed tough web server security protocols to help ensure your online store is safe from hackers attacks, while still maintaining unsurpassed speed and service reliability. With abundant disk space and generous data transfers, visitors to your online store can buy your products online quickly and feel safe when conducting business with you over the internet.
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Ecommerce Hosting Requiremnets
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Hosting requirements will differ from business to business. Small startup online stores hosting needs will be much less than that of established large retail stores. To help determine what your hosting requirements might be, there are 5 basic things to consider.
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The speed of the Hosting Web Server.
To determine whether you will have a fast hosting service, you need to understand what a Web Server is. Put very simply, a Web Server is a computer connected to the internet that hosts websites. These computers can be fast or slow, new or old. The older the computer is, the older the technology is, the slower the Web Server is more likely to be - and more unreliable too. Whilst newer Web Server computers will usually be faster and more reliable, both old and new Web Server computers can be configured to deliberately run slower by having less RAM, slower CPUs and by sharing components. Just like the computer you use at home or work, speed and reliability are dependant on its CPU, RAM and the quality of its components, as well as how it is maintained.
Almost all websites have a shared hosting on a Web Server. The more websites there are on that particular Web Server the slower the websites will be on that server because each website will be sharing the Web Server computers resources, for example RAM, CPU, Hard Disk, network, cache. This can be a serious problem as some Web Servers can host hundreds, or thousands of websites. And if your website shares the same Web Server as a website that gets a lot of visitors, it can slow down your website considerably. To alleviate this problem, some hosting companies will restrict the speed of all the websites on the server so that you will never get a fast website.
More often than not, hosting companies that offer very cheap deals with high, or unlimited bandwidth and hard Disk space are using older, less reliable Web Servers that host large numbers of websites. So while you might think you are getting a good deal, its important to remember that if you have a slow ecommerce website it will cost you more due to lost sales. Your Online Shop regularly updates its Web Servers and does not shape, or restrict the speed of any online store that is hosted on their Web Servers, this ensures your store is fast and reliable.
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Bandwidth allocation.
Bandwidth is how many bytes of data is downloaded, or uploaded to your website hosting. Viewing your webpage, sending and receiving emails all use up your hosting bandwidth. For startup small online stores, which get up to a few hundred visitors a day, 2 Gigabytes of bandwidth is usually sufficient. Bandwidth is the most expensive part of your hosting, so its important to know that hosting companies that offer cheap unlimited bandwidth will restrict the speed of your website - which will cost you sales. Following are a few tips for reducing your bandwidth usgae.
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When someone visits a page your site they are consuming your sites hosting bandwidth. Most of the bandwidth is downloaded data. How much bandwidth they use depends on how much information is displayed on the page being viewed on your website. Pages with text dont use much, but pages with lots of images, videos, music or multimedia use a lot of bandwidth. Because visitors to your site use up your bandwidth, the more visitors you get the more bandwidth you will use. Having your sites images and multimedia content optimised for the web is a good way to save on bandwidth with the added bonus of getting a faster website.
Sending and recieving emails also uses up your bandwidth. While text only emails dont use much, large file attachments do. Email wasnt designed to send large files over the net, you are better off using a free file sending service like yousendit.com or dropbox.com.
If you sell products that are delivered by download direct from your online store, you will probably have a requirement for more Hard Disk space. Digital products are usually stored on your web hosting hard disk. Some digital products like music and video files are quite large, so care will need to taken in calculating your stores Hard Disk space needs.
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Hard Disk Space.
All websites require hard disk space. This where your websites files and database are stored. Its also where your emails are temporarily kept.
For all but the most largest of stores, 1 Gigabyte of Hard Disk space is enough. Following is an overview of a typical online stores Hard Disk usage.
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Your Online Shops store files are about 80 Megabytes in size. This will increase as you add your products images. A typical product image size should be between 30 and 150 Kilobytes in size.
As your online store grows, so does the stores database. Your stores database starts out at about 400 kilobytes in size and can grow to between 10 and 20 Megabytes - depending on how many products you have and how many shoppers visit your store. Only very large online stores with thousands of visitors per day will exceed this.
Emails can use up a lot of Hard Disk space. The typical personal email account would have between 20 and 50 Megabytes allocated to it. This is because most people send and receive attachments, like images or a pdf in their emails. However most store admin email messages only contain text, so they require less hard disk space - usually 5 Megabytes is enough.
Digital or Virtual downloaded products. If you sell products that are delivered by download direct from your online store, you will probably have a requirement for more Hard Disk space. Digital products are usually stored on your web hosting hard disk. Some digital products like music and video files are quite large, so care will need to taken in calculating your stores hard disk space needs.
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How many email address acounts do you need.
Most online stores only need to use a few email addresses. Too many can be confusing for your customers.
One email address for online enquiries, eg. info@ or sales@ or enquiries@
One for Administration or accounts. eg admin@ or accounts@
And another as your personal email account as the business owner. eg peter@ or sue@
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