Compare Ecommerce Web Hosting Companies

update December 15th, 2008

Ecom Resource Center brings you a comprehensive review of ecommerce web hosting companies and their services.

Our review is limited to USA-based companies that provide "ecommerce web hosting", as opposed to just regular hosting. Ecommerce web hosting basically demands additional hosting features, including: electronic catalogs or shopping cart hosting, secure socket layer (SSL) certificate hosting on the server, connection access to a payment gateway for credit card processing from virtual host, and secure website access.

In addition, for ecommerce sites that offer subscription access, the ecommerce web hosting needs to provide access for customizing the .htaccess so that a username/password access system to authenticate the user's account can be set up.

The comparison chart below, gives you company service comparison. For more detailed description (including pricing analysis) you can click on the details or pricing for each company.

In our review, we selected companies that can offer all or most of the components needed for an ecommerce web hosting service. These componets are outlined below:

Ecommerce Web Hosting (includes bandwidth, hard disk, and services below)
Domain Name (most companies now include this with ecommerce web hosting service)
Business/Company Website
Electronic Catalog (can also be part of or integrated with your website)
Shopping Cart or a Single Order Page
Checkout Page (where secure credit card is collected from your customer)
Payment Processing Service (or Payment Gateway Connection)
Manual Processing of telephone/fax orders (also called Virtual Terminal)
Customer/Order Management System (transaction database)
Reporting System (for sales/marketing/accounting/customer analysis)
Technical Support
Internet Merchant Account