E-Commerce Hosting

Web-hosting for small e-commerce sites

Even a basic inexpensive web hosting service will have the right features for a personal website, but it you want to sell something on your site, you'll need some special features like a shopping cart, the ability to accept online payments, and inventory tracking. You'll also need more server space and bandwidth to handle all of your potential traffic and customer orders.

The services covered above provide hosting for e-commerce ventures, but we found reviews that specifically evaluate host services for that purpose. Half a dozen e-commerce services receive credible, favorable reviews. However, user reviews and commentary on other websites paint unattractive pictures of all of them. This is understandable because managing an e-commerce website demands a certain amount of technical knowledge. Customers can become frustrated by not being able to understand tech support.

Although all these services have some unhappy customers, two stand out. Yahoo! Small Business (starting at *est. $40 per month + 1.5% transaction fee), draws the highest percentage of consumer complaints, as described earlier in this report. Conversely, Netfirms.com (*est. $10 or $15 per month) has the highest percentage of happy customers, even though prices are a fraction of what Yahoo! charges.

Business Week's Catherine Holahan says Netfirms is the best cheap service, and the company currently has more than a million customers, hosting more than 15,000 online stores. In a single-service review for ECommerce-Guide.com, Sean Kerner summarizes, "most users will find great value for the price paid." He implies he'd prefer a service that is easier to customize, but concludes, "Considering that Netfirms' e-commerce pricing, including hosting, starts at only $10 per month (which includes 2 free domain names), we suspect that a lot of users won't mind too much investing some additional time to fully customize and realize the potential of their storefronts." Holahan reports that Netfirms users' websites sometimes don't show up in search engine results. To help you gain exposure, Netfirms bundles a $25 Google AdWords coupon to help your site garner traffic.

Netfirms' base business plan includes 250 GB of disk space, 2,000 GB of bandwidth, 500 e-mail accounts, two domain names, a shopping cart, 30 MySQL 5+ databases (for inventory management), WebStats, spam filtering and a WordPress business blog. The higher-end plan includes 300 GB of disk space, 3,000 GB of bandwidth and a few more advanced Windows hosting features. Although Netfirms offers 24/7 support, telephone support is not toll-free. Uptime is 99.989% according to VistaInter.com.

ProStores.com (starting at *est. $30 per month) is recommended in a November 2006 review by PC Magazine, but the service is more advanced and better suited to larger enterprises. Kathy Yakal says, "ProStores provides the best tools and documentation we've seen so far for [online stores]."

Dotster.com (starting at *est. $35 per month) includes a VPS service that's been selected as an Editor's Choice by Service Provider Weekly in a single-service review. The review says Dotster's virtual private servers (VPS) are equivalent to having a dedicated server, but at a much lower price. However, the Dotster service is more suitable for a professional webmaster than an entrepreneur who wants a do-it-yourself approach with some handholding.

Web Host Magazine gives high rankings to iRepublics.com (basic service is free with domain name purchase), OLM.net (starting at *est. $35 per month) and Apollo Hosting.com (starting at *est. $20 per month). None of these services fare as well in user reviews, and Web Host Magazine's reviews date to the first half of 2005.