Shopify Hosting Review: Is It A Good Host for Ecommerce Store?
By Sam Nguyen
Drive 20-40% of your revenue with Avada
As we all know, Shopify is currently one of the most incredible eCommerce platforms in the eCommerce marketplace and the easiest-to-use method to help build up your beginning business as well as online stores. Its aim is to develop hassle-free platforms to set up and let you manage your own online business.
Shopify is also a leading website for eCommerce hosting that provides its users with all of the important services like site hosting, domain registration, content management, and payment processing.
Shopify empowers you to set up your store and sell whatever you want, including goods and services. You are able to get your items organized, get your store customized like what you wish, accept payments, including online and credit cards, track and respond to your orders, and you can perform all with Shopify’s interface. Besides becoming a fully integrated eCommerce solution and offering online shops to let you customize and tweak your content, it is capable of featuring heavy out of the box but still does not drag load times. In addition, although payment plans are being based on monthly billing and everyone is running profitable stores, those should quickly be a negligible cost.
No matter whether you are Shopify’s long-users or just a beginner, in this article, we will help you shed light on Shopify Hosting Review.
What is Shopify Hosting?
Shopify offers eCommerce hosting for all users’ accounts. Relying on the plan, you can use domain names or possess myshopify.com subdomain. In case you are fond of hosting non-Shopify sites, you can reach different hosts. If you run Shopify-based sites, it gives you all the useful tools you need.
Recommend: How to Choose an Ecommerce Hosting Plan for Your Busines
Shopify Hosting Security Review
Security is known as one of Shopify’s key points. It’s really safe to buy from a Shopify store. You should keep in mind that accepting credit card payments online only requires compliance with PCI standards. Shopify can meet every level of PCI compliance.
All customers’ sites on Shopify are the PCI compliant. Each site goes with SSL certificates without any extra cost. Shopify content is widely encrypted as well as sent over HTTPS to ensure that individual information cannot become intercepted and content cannot be replaced in transit. Because Shopify is now a cloud service, its software is up to date daily. Online merchants do not have to be worried about software upgrades or backups.
Shopify Hosting Review: CDN
For anyone who has not used to CDN on Shopify, CDN stands for a Content Delivery Network. CDN is related to a geographically distributed group of servers that work well together in order to offer fast delivery of the Internet content. A CDN empowers you to quickly transfer the assets that are necessary for loading Internet content, consisting of stylesheets, videos, images, HTML pages, and javascript.
As you might not know, the popularity of CDN can keep growing, and there is the fact that a huge amount of web traffic is always served through CDNs, including traffic from common sites such as Netflix, Amazon, or Facebook. An accurately configured CDN can help to protect your sites from several malicious attacks like Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks.
A CDN does not host any content, and it is very hard to replace the need for proper web hosting. In addition, it aids in caching content at the network edge with the aim of improving the site’s performance. Many sites are struggling to meet their performance by some traditional hosting services, and that is the reason why they choose CDNs.
With CDNs, it helps utilize caching to decrease hosting bandwidth and prevents interruptions in the service to boost security. Currently, CDNs are considered as one of the most popular choices to ease pain points, followed by traditional web hosting.
Thanks to CDNs, your sites can have lots of benefits. CDNs aid in enhancing your website load times by distributing your content closer to your site, then visitors can experience faster page loading times. And the faster a site becomes, the more visitors will be ready to stay longer.
Additionally, a CDN helps reduce bandwidth costs. When it comes to CDNs, bandwidth consumption costs for site hosting is expensive. Via caching, along with other optimizations, CDSs can reduce data and offer an origin server. Regarding content, it helps foster your content redundancy and availability. You will see that a larget amount of traffic and hardware failures are able to interrupt fundamental website functions. Due to having distributed nature, a CDN can assist in handling more traffic, along with withstanding hardware failure, which is better than any other origin servers. A CDN can also improve your site’s security by launching DDoS mitigation, offering improvements to security qualifications, and another optimization.
In the past, Shopify was also the initial hosted eCommerce site solution to use CDN. CDN is becoming the largest network of serves that are placed all over the world to make sure that your clients are able to load your site store faster no matter where they are.
Easy Store Set-Up Process
Before setting up a store, you had better dig into detailed information on how to plan your online store. Those instructions aim to lead you through single and simple steps. You can begin with how to have a domain name before getting your sites published.
The first thing to do after obtaining the domain is inserting items and choosing themes. You do not need to worry since static pages can be added if necessary, followed by menus that link to them.
Next, the process of setting up allows users to opt for shipping methods, payments, and particular tax requirements. Then after building up the website, users can test it as well as place trial orders to guarantee everything is totally fine. The store set-up process is very straightforward that knowing little technical knowledge is needed. The testing mode enables users to make sure their sites are what exactly their customers want before having it published.
As you finish signing up, you will see exactly how to set up your online store with ease. Your website is only done within seconds, and upgrades are always performed.
Regarding store customization, there remain two ways that customers can customize the feel, the look, and the behavior of your sites. They are themes and apps. Besides some free available apps and themes, you can seek for premium options that your customers can buy. Shopify also gives its own customers the capability to generate its own apps and themes.
Unlimited Bandwidth
During generating a site and selecting web hosting services, the large amount of bandwidth is one of the most important requirements to ask users to consider. You can decide on the exact amount of bandwidth, along with the kind of hosting service that is used for the site. This will not be an easy task. You are strongly recommended to find the right bandwidth for your sites’ goal since failing to do so will result in underperforming your site or money-consuming. In some situations, both can happen.
Bandwidth is simply known as a measure of traffic level and the data amount that will be transferred among your site, the Internet, and users. It is measured in bits per second. That means the more bandwidth you have, the faster the speed of activities on your site becomes. Take note that data and level of traffic are always transferred as long as users visit their sites, downloads, uploads, or stream online.
There might not be unlimited bandwidth. Instead, it is just like it happens too high to be noticed. In fact, hosting companies find it impossible to offer users unlimited bandwidth. As hosting companies say that they can provide you with unlimited bandwidth, this means that you can apply bandwidth without restriction; however, it must be on the scale that hosting companies can acquire. Also, every server for your sites is packed with a limit, and before choosing a hosting company service, you had better estimate the bandwidth your sites might require.
Freely Choose Your Domain Name
Shopify can make it easy to generate as well as register domain names for your new site. You are able to purchase a new domain through Shopify or use existing domains or use the free .myshopify.com domain. In addition, Shopify users are allowed to optimize their own brand with custom domain names bought through Shopify. As mentioned earlier, they can use the existing domain name and make use of the free.myshopify.com domain.
Recommend: How to Choose a Domain Name that Fits Your Business
Instant updates
If you have been a Shopify user for a long time, you can see that all of the Shopify updated will become automatic; hence you will get the latest features instantly without suffering from any hassle.
Unlimited email forwarding
As you intend to purchase domain names, you will be provided an unlimited quantity of forwarding email addresses for free. For example, in case your own domain name is yourstore.com, you are able to generate addresses such as [email protected].
Then, a message will be sent to your new email, and it will also be forwarded to the email account you already had. This is believed to save your time and make your store become professional.
Shopify Hosting Review: Uptime
With the eCommerce platform, uptime plays a key role. After everything is finished, there will be unavailable sites that mean your customers are unable to buy items. This matter can directly affect your business’ bottom line. When it comes to Shopify, it keeps its promise to the customers a 99.98% uptime. Customers can check the Shopify’s infrastructure’s status and how this platform is performing.
Shopify Hosting Support Review
Should you have problems with Shopify, there are some things you can do. Meanwhile, customers who have issues with Shopify will obtain themselves options to select from regarding getting the help they really need.
First, Shopify provides your customers with a Support Wizard where they can inform the detailed issues. This kind of support is a fancy search engine to return documents customers can find them useful. In case nothing good comes up, the customers can contact Shopify representatives.
Customers can also ask for a personal assistant via phone, email, or live chat 24/7. You can bear in mind that Shopify is able to track all of the problems as well as contain things such as status information so that customers will know when their problems are fixed or not and what has been done. Last but not least, Shopify can give publicly-accessible online forums that aim at allowing its customers to discuss problems and recommended advice.
Pricing plans
Shopify pricing can become lofty that reaches $299 dollars for an advanced monthly plan; however, the company’s other plans cab give a variety of features to build your online store and get online relatively painlessly.
With every hike in cost comes a package upgrade that includes added eCommerce features such as gift card functionality, advanced tools for reporting, shopping carts, or shipping. Relying on what the online store building needs are, you are able to find a Shopify package that is suitable for your eCommerce expectations. One more thing that you should not forget that it is all fully hosted.
Other Hosting Providers that Can Connect to Shopify
You should keep in mind that while you are able to host your own eCommerce store on Shopify, you had better apply other hosting providers, then connect your store to one of them. Basically, there are several best hosting companies that can offer you Shopify integration, and you should check out some of them below for further references.
1 & 1 {#1-1}
Being known as among the world’s biggest web hosting companies, IONOS by 1&1 can give your site a good solution that provides you with amazingly affordable pricing plans. When it comes to 1 & 1, you are allowed to integrate your Shopify store with ease and start getting your products sold in your online shop. Definitely, 1 & 1 offers you a free SSL certificate that makes it become a potential solution to Shopify hosting.
BlueHost
Besides 1 & 1, another hosting company with Shopify integration is BlueHost. In general, Shopify owns DNS configuration instruction to aid you in integrating your Shopify’s store into every hosting provider. BlueHost has no differences, and with its low priced plans, along with workable services, you had better consider using BlueHost for your own Shopify hosting platform.
GoDaddy
It can be a mistake if you do not mention GoDaddy as one of the most useful Shopify Hosting Providers. Like other Shopify hosting providers, GoDaddy is loaded with Shopify integration and makes it become easy for you to use. With GoDaddy, it can go with a free SSL qualification and turn it into an amazing alternative to Shopify hosting. GoDaddy empowers you to access its site builder that can benefit your site with Shopify’s eCommerce platform.
InMotion Hosting
InMotion Hosting is also regarded as one of the quickest companies worldwide. With InMotion Hosting, there exist two available data centers/ They are one in US-EAST as well as one in US WEST. This is to ensure that American customers in the United States can enjoy good bandwidth, followed by speedy websites.
If users were in Asia or Africa, he or she might witness a slow website experience. The average loading up time is 149.3ms for every user around the world.
InMotion aids you in hosting multiple websites, which depends on the plan you are choosing.
HostGator
This is known as one of the fastest website hosting companies all over the world, and it just stands behind InMotion. This provider offers its customers unlimited bandwidth for every type of hosting plan. Particularly, their cloud service is on top. Additionally, HostGator response time is extremely fast for users in the world, although its data center is located in the United States.
They have an average website speed of 144 ms worldwide. It shows that they have a good bandwidth.
Let’s consider using HostGator, which is a really good choice if you tend to be building a business website in order to help increase your visibility online or to get more and leads.
Other Hosting Providers
As you can see, in addition to those above Shopify Hosting Providers, there are other good other Shopify hosting providers, including HostGator, 123-Reg, and Domain.com. All of them can provide you easy Shopify integration. However, you have to make sure to search for each hosting provider to decide which one is the most suitable services at an affordable price for you.
Conclusion
With Shopify Hosting Review, we hope that you can have a better understanding of Shopify Hosting. Basically, Shopify’s target market is too small for medium businesses that they want to have a turnkey e-commerce solution. It is useful for that market also. Shopify allows customization for its product through apps and themes.
Ecommerce platforms and other hosting services empower you to have more control over your site, but they might ask for more maintenance work and development. Shopify is giving its users a very good eCommerce experience with an affordable cost as well as a small amount of effort. If you find this article helpful, let’s help us share this on your social media. We would love to hear more from you.
New Posts
