When considering web hosting for ecommerce web sites, and selecting a web host to use, webmasters usually focus on the obvious requirements and features.

These would be things like shopping carts, SSL, price, disk space and bandwidth.

However, there are many other features which can be just as important as the type of shopping cart available, or the monthly fee you will be charged for the hosting. These are mainly to do with the fact that an ecommerce site will be taking a certain additional investment from you, either in time or in money, and often in both. This means that you, the webmaster, are depending on the hosting service to provide your customers with what they need to see, and you are depending on the host to give you the tools you need to make your ecommerce site a success.

What are we getting at here?

In terms of your customers, it's obvious - the host needs to be reliable enough to serve pages close to 100% of the time. Whatever promotion methods you are going to use for the site - Search Engine Optimization, link building, pay-per-click, banner ads - any time a user clicks through and the site is not available then you have potentially lost a sale. Apart from that, it makes your site seem unprofessional and untrustworthy. So the host must be reliable - very reliable.

In terms of you as a webmaster, the hosting service you choose must be able to provide the tools, as part of the price of the hosting, which can give you the information you need to make your budgeting and promotion decisions. This includes things like good, live stats, access to the server logs if you want to run data mining or analysis of your traffic, and access to error logs.

If you are going to install your own scripts, can you count on any help or technical support? Is there going to be someone on the end of the phone on the support desk whenever you need them? Are you limited in the number of mySQL databases you can install?

It will pay you to ask these questions and get answers to them before you sign up. Often the best hosting price is obtained by signing up for a year or more, but if you find the web hosting for ecommerce service is not that good, you will sometimes lose some or all of the fee, as well as having to look for another host and having to recreate your site on it.

So remember, don't let the price of the hosting or its basic features be the only things you investigate before signing up with your new ecommerce host.