When considering which are the best e-commerce hosting companies of 2024, we wanted to make sure they were cost-effective, easy to use and had features important to e-commerce business owners. We also considered real customer reviews and added benefits rarely found in a hosting company.
Here are some of the categories we used to rank the providers that made the top of the list.
Pricing
Fees should be minimal for e-commerce hosts, aside from a monthly service plan and per-transaction fees charged by the payment provider. Our focus was on each provider’s starting cost for its plans, what it charged to renew once the initial contract ended, how many sites were covered under its plan and if it offered a money-back guarantee and the length of that guarantee. The hosting services with low starting prices, lower renewal prices and lengthy money-back guarantee periods fared the best in our rankings. Pricing accounted for 10% of our weighted scoring.
Features
Certain features and functionalities are essential for an e-commerce hosting service to provide. For example, does the host company have a 100% uptime guarantee? If not, do customers have to pay extra to get help from tech support? Along those same lines is customer support. Many host companies have 24/7 support 365 days per year. This is the standard because downtime costs an e-commerce store money, so those hosting services that offered 24/7 support scored best.
Other general features we expected to see included offering unlimited storage and bandwidth―if not included in a standard plan, then definitely in a premium plan―providing free domain name and SSL certificates and offering encryption protection and cPanel control panel software developed.
Some additional features we wanted to see included providers that offered free domain privacy protection and business email addresses, a content delivery network (CDN), website builder and providing automatic backups of data. We weighted features at 50% of our total score.
Third-party reviews
We wanted to know what e-commerce business owners think of the e-commerce host they use. We turned to third-party review websites to gauge user opinions of these services, looking at reviews that scored at least 3.5 out of 5. Hosting services that had at least 300 reviews scored higher in our rankings. These accounted for 10% of the total score.
Expert analysis
Analyzing customer reviews, our experts looked at four key metrics to gauge how well these e-commerce hosting companies provide their services. One such metric is ease of use. Do business owners have to do any coding or does the host have a website builder that makes it easy to set up a storefront? The other metrics we considered were any stand-out features, overall popularity and value for the money. Altogether, this analysis made up 30% of the total score.
Learn how we evaluate web hosting services.