Ecommerce webhosting for small and medium-site business is viable if they use web hosting sites. Hosting their own site is not practical considering the setup costs for server hardware, bandwidth capacity and software development. And if the server is up, maintenance is another thing to be considered. Also it requires a lot of technical skills, time and effort to put up.

Fortunately, you have an option for ecommerce webhosting. Instead of putting up your own, you can engage the services of an ecommerce webhosting company. There are number of eccomerce webhosting service over the internet. For businesses, choosing the right ecommerce webhosting can be a challenge. Not only because if the sheer number o webhosting sites but also because e-businesses have special needs different from that of a personal web site. It is important to choose wisely for your online site especially if it generates money transactions.

In selecting an ecommerce webhosting service you should consider the following:

An ecommerce wbhosting should have enough bandwidth. This is necessary requirement for webhosting service so that your site can be easily downloaded by your business clients. Also, you need to capture information site visitors send such as registrations, orders, credit card data and many others. An ecommerce webhosting service should have more than enough bandwidth for all these requirements. An ecommerce webhosting provider with a minimum of one T-3 (45 mbps) line connection is recommended.

An ecommerce webhosting service should have few hops from the internet backbone. "Hop" refers to each server or router location internet traffic must travel before reaching its destination. An ecommerce webhosting service that has few hops offers a more efficient data handling service. The further "downstream" the provider is the more chances for things to go wrong. Even some small ecommerce webhosting companies co-locate their computers at a site that feeds directly to the internet's backbone. An ecommerce webhosting service that has top of the line hardware with multi-processor server machines will most probably serve your business site better. Another important consideration is the redundancy and reliability factors. An ecommerce webhosting service should have more than one backbone provider to ensure reliability. Disk space provided by the ecommerce webhosting service should also be a factor. Some ecommerce webhosting services also provide software for building online catalogs such as softcart by Mercantec, shopsite by ICentral and Commerce Publisher by iCat. Ecoomerce webhosting should also provide security for online transactions. Currently, the standard is Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption. Payment processing is another important feature that an ecommerce webhosting service should provide. The most popular payment processors are: Cybercash, Segue Systems and ICVerify.

Site owners often look for an ecommerce webhosting service that can transfer data from the site directly to their accounting, inventory and database systems. This is called back-end integration. And lastly, an ecommerce webhosting should be able to excellent service for a reasonable cost. An ecommerce webhosting could fetch anywhere between $100- $150 per month. Some sites need to pay more due to the more features they require.