BigCommerce Hosting Review
By Sam Nguyen
To go live, every online store needs one thing: a web host. Hosting allows it to connect to the internet and be available for customers to visit and purchase items. A hosting platform is of great importance since it is a foundation to ensure the success of your business. The right hosting can greatly boost your online store’s performance and growth.
As you might have heard of BigCommerce before, BigCommerce is a fully hosted e-commerce platform that allows business owners to build online stores and sell their products on the website. So what is “fully hosted”, what are the main features of BigCommerce Hosting, and what are the advantages and disadvantages of this hosting option?
All these questions will be answered in this in-depth BigCommerce Hosting Review.
BigCommerce Hosting Overview
First and foremost, let’s have a look at the definition of an e-commerce hosting, some common hosting types, and then we will go into details about the main features that BigCommerce Hosting has.
What is E-commerce Hosting?
Ecommerce hosting is a business that involves a hosting platform helping you to host an electronic commerce website. It provides you with everything needed to operate an online business effectively, ranging from payment processing, security, SSL and shopping cart software, etc.
Common Hosting Types
| Hosting Type | Description | Best For | Considerations |
| Shared Hosting | Multiple websites share the same server resources. It's cost-effective but has limited resources and security. | Small businesses, blogs, and personal websites starting out. | Slower performance during peak traffic, security concerns due to shared environment. |
| VPS Hosting | A virtualized server providing more control and dedicated resources within a shared environment. | Websites outgrowing shared hosting, requiring better performance without the cost of dedicated hosting. | Requires technical knowledge; resources are still shared among VPS users, though to a lesser extent. |
| Dedicated Hosting | Provides a website with its own server, offering full control and resources. | Large businesses and high-traffic websites needing optimal performance and control. | Expensive, requires technical expertise for server management. |
| Cloud Hosting | Distributes resources across multiple virtual servers in the cloud, offering scalability and high availability. | Businesses looking for scalability, reliability, and high performance, especially with fluctuating traffic. | Pay-as-you-go pricing can lead to variable costs; pricing model may be complex. |
| Managed Hosting | The hosting provider manages the server, including security, maintenance, and updates. Can be applied to various hosting types. | Businesses lacking technical expertise or preferring to focus on core operations rather than server management. | More expensive than unmanaged hosting, but includes valuable management services. |
BigCommerce hosting falls under the category of managed cloud hosting. This means BigCommerce takes care of all the hosting details for you. They manage the servers, security, and updates. You don’t need to worry about the technical side of keeping your site online.
BigCommerce Hosting Features
BigCommerce hosting offers a wide range of features that support online businesses of all sizes. Here’s a breakdown of what’s included across all pricing plans and some advanced features available in higher-tier plans:
Features included in all pricing plans:
| Feature | How It Helps Businesses |
| Unlimited products, file storage, and bandwidth | Allows businesses to grow without worrying about hitting limits. |
| Industry-leading uptime at 99.99% | Ensures online stores are almost always available to customers. |
| Fast load times | Improves customer experience and can boost sales by reducing bounce rates. |
| Unlimited staff accounts | Lets teams manage the store without access restrictions. |
| Data centers with backup | Minimizes risk of downtime, keeping the store online. |
| Built-in blog | Enhances SEO and engages customers with valuable content. |
| Free Sitewide HTTPS and Dedicated SSL | Secures customer data and improves trust and conversion rates. |
| Page Builder | Simplifies website updates and customization, no coding needed. |
| Professional reporting tools | Offers insights into sales, marketing effectiveness, and customer behavior. |
| Mobile responsive website | Ensures a good shopping experience on any device. |
| BigCommerce mobile app | Allows store management on the go. |
| No additional transaction fees | Lowers operating costs by removing extra fees on sales. |
| Single-page checkout | Reduces cart abandonment by streamlining the checkout process. |
Advanced features on Plus, Pro and Enterprise pricing plans:
| Feature | How It Helps Businesses |
| Customer groups and segmentation | Enables personalized shopping experiences, improving customer satisfaction and loyalty. |
| Abandoned cart saver | Recaptures potential sales by reminding customers of their unfinished purchases. |
| Product filtering | Enhances the shopping experience by making it easier for customers to find products. |
| Unlimited API Calls | Supports seamless integration with third-party services, enhancing store functionality. |
| Varying online sales limits | Aligns hosting plan capabilities with business size and sales volume, ensuring businesses only pay for what they need. |
Sales Thresholds:
BigCommerce Hosting offers four pricing plans:
- Standard: $39/month.
- Plus: $105/month.
- Pro: $399/month.
- Enterprise: Custom pricing.
Each pricing plan has a maximum annual online sales limit, ensuring you choose the plan that best fits your business size and growth trajectory. The Standard, Plus, and Pro plans have annual sales limits of $50,000, $180,000, and $400,000, respectively. The Enterprise plan offers customizable sales thresholds to suit your business needs. In addition to the extensive features highlighted, BigCommerce hosting provides a convenient maintenance mode for BigCommerce merchants. This feature is invaluable for making significant updates or changes to your website without disrupting the shopping experience. During maintenance, you can display a custom message to inform visitors about the ongoing updates, ensuring transparency and maintaining customer trust.
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Pros and Cons of Bigcommerce Hosting
Pros of BigCommerce Hosting:
- Feature-Packed: The BigCommerce platform provides a comprehensive set of features right from its Standard plans, making it one of the most equipped e-commerce platforms.
- User-Friendly: Easy to use interfaces and pre-built themes help set up online stores quickly, requiring minimal technical knowledge.
- Unlimited Essentials: Offers unlimited products, file storage, and bandwidth across all plans.
- API Performance: Excellent API capabilities allow for extensive platform data access and support high-volume operations, enabling a headless commerce experience.
- Reliability: The platform boasts a High Availability system, ensuring 99.99% uptime for online stores.
- Security: BigCommerce is a certified secure platform, with ISO/IEC 27001:2013 accreditation and PCI DSS 3.1, Level 1 certification.
- Scalability: Supports business growth with numerous integrations and apps for selling across various channels, including major marketplaces and social media.
- Cost-Effective: Lower overall cost due to inclusive hosting services, with a consistent monthly fee and no extra processing fees for using third-party payment gateways.
- Advanced Reporting: Comprehensive reporting tools available on all plans through the BigCommerce Analytics Dashboard.
- SEO Excellence: Offers customizable, SEO-friendly URLs, AMP support for templates, and automated image optimization.
- 24/7 Support: Round-the-clock tech support with added benefits for Enterprise-level plan subscribers.
Cons of BigCommerce Hosting:
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BigCommerce offers certain advanced features that other platforms offer at a significantly lower price.
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Annual online sales are limited, and if you surpass them, you’ll have to upgrade to a more costly monthly package.
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In most instances, the free themes are very similar to one another, which limits customer’s customization experience. The number of fonts used in the free themes is also extremely limited. A host of premium themes are available, but they come at steep costs. The Page Builder functionality still needs more improvement since it is rather buggy and confusingly implemented at times.
Criteria to consider when choosing the best hosting for your online business
When choosing a hosting provider for your online business, there are multiple factors to take into consideration. Here we would like to mention seven most pivotal aspects that would help you in the process of selecting the best e-commerce hosting.
Average uptime
Uptime is the average amount of time your website is available and open to visitors within a given period of time. This factor is of great significance because there is nothing more annoying on the internet than opening a site and it not working or available. Moreover, it can result in the smaller amount of traffic your website gets and the total potential sales in the long run, your business makes.
Therefore, remember to check the hosting service availability and guarantee that the uptime is above 99% and never below 99.90%. The closer it is to 100%, the better the average uptime is.
Loading speed
Loading speed is basically the amount of time it takes for a website to load. As you can tell, loading speed plays a vital role in the decision of customers to stay on the website and purchase an item or not. According to a study by Google , 53% of mobile site visitors will leave a page if the loading speed is more than 3 seconds.
It is, therefore, your job to make sure the hosting you choose takes around 3 seconds or less.
Available bandwidth and storage
Another major factor is bandwidth and storage. Web hosting bandwidth is the amount of data that a website is capable of delivering to its visitors in a given period of time. Hence, it is obvious that the higher the bandwidth a hosting provider offers, the better it is for your customers’ experience and for your business growth.
As you know, storage refers to the amount of content that you can store, including text, pictures, code, databases, etc. Similar to bandwidth, the more storage you have, the better the hosting.
The best hosting provider will be the one that offers unlimited bandwidth and storage, and BigCommerce is among those ideal hosting providers.
Customer Support
Checking out which channels you can ask for help from the hosting provider is also important, especially in case you do not have much technical knowledge and development skills.
Pricing
Another thing to consider is the cost of the hosting provider. It should be based on your budget and your business needs. Whenever purchasing any features, think about them carefully to see whether they are actually cost-efficient or not. Because paying more does not always mean better services and experience.
Room for growth
Your hosting platform should be geared towards long-term development because changing your site to a different platform can cause great difficulties for both you and your customers. Considering a web host that can grow with you is a great idea to keep in mind.
When starting out, you may not really pay attention to the high-traffic capabilities of a host. Nevertheless, if committed to your online business in the long run and focused on sustainable and scalable growth, you should go for a hosting service that can handle traffic demands in months and years to come.
Cloud hosting, for example, is one great solution that offers almost unlimited growth capabilities for your business.
Data security
When looking for a hosting web service, keep an eye on security. Security here means both your business and your customers’ data are safe. The best hosting should provide great security features such as firewalls, SSL certificates, DDoS protection, virus protection, domain name privacy, and secure data centers.
Conclusion
Being purchased by tens of thousands of B2B and B2C businesses across 150 countries in the world, BigCommerce hosting is undoubtedly among the leading open-source SaaS eCommerce platforms for mid-market and enterprise businesses. It showcases all of the advantages of a SaaS platform ranging from ease of use, high performance to constant updates along with APIs that allow businesses to expand at a greater scale with numerous third-party apps and integrations.
PageBuilder makes it simple for every new merchant to start building online stores without much tech skills; however, it could improve much more regarding template diversity and steep costs to pay premium themes.
Hopefully, you learn something new and useful about BigCommerce Hosting through this review. If you have any questions, feel free to comment below. Thank you for reading!
