Is a shared hosting enough for running a b2c eCommerce site?

I am preparing to build a site and start a eCommerce business, I find many people say shared hosting is good and economical, but I'm wondering if it is enough for a b2c ecommerce site?

Until your site is live and you can see how much traffic you are getting a shared hosting plan will be fine. You can always move the site onto your own VPS if you feel that's required in the future and your site and traffic grows.

For ecommerce web hosting I would not recommend shared hosting firstly because with shared hosting there are issue's of limited resources, since sharing a server is sharing system resources with other users on one physical machine and therefore every user has some restrictions on their service. For example, if any of the users on the shared server uses a lot of traffic, CPU cycles, email capabilities etc, you or other individuals on the same machine are likely to experience worse shared hosting performance.

As of my opinion I would recommend ecommerce manage cloud hosting for your ecommerce site, because it's comparatively easier to launch and manage even for people with little or no experience in web hosting and also its very secure compared to other hosting services out there. Cloudways also offers one of the best managed ecommerce cloud hosting service with features such as 1-click setup, user friendly easy to use console and lot more. But that's not even all, the best thing about Cloudways managed ecommerce cloud hosting is that it's highly scalable, this feature gives the option to new businesses and entrepreneurs to increase hosting requirements as their business grows, this way you only have pay according to your exact hosting requirements and not more.

Like as said above, shared hosting is not the perfect hosting solution for eCommerce business, but to reduce the startup cost or low visitors/transaction websites can be hosted with daily backup. For eCommerce business, dedicated server is highly recommended if the budget is not limited, otherwise, can go with VPS too which would be far better than shared server.

For e-comerce its always more ideal to be on a hosting platform where the resources are segmented more cleanly and securely, which isnt the case on shared platforms. Your shared hosting environment is as secure as however many people are using it.

Yes, it is enough to run ecommerce website. But you need to understand traffic that would be coming to your site. If its within limited/allocated resources, you can opt for shared hosting. But if not, you need to think about VPS hosting.

simon258 said:

If your eCommerce website having less products than shared hosting will be good for you

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This is total wrong, number of products doesn't affect to VPS perfomance, if you are running an online business website, for example wordpress and woocommerce, then number of plugins or addons and traffic on your site will decide you should go with a shared or a VPS hosting.

If you have an e-commerce portal, then shared hosting is a strict NO. Not only the resource limitation affects the portal, but also there are security considerations as you are sharing resources with other websites. If a server is no secured properly, another hacked website may cause issues. Also, if you plan to set a payment gateway you need a PCI-compliant server. Shared hosting servers are generally not PCI-compliant. For E-Commerce, it is always advisable to have a dedicated or a cloud server.

Since you have to start somewhere my recommendation would be Performance webhosting, which usally has more resources allocated than regular budget shared plans.
Above it was mentioned a PCI-compliant service so you could process credit cards directly without a 3rd party service, however not even most VPS services meet those criteria, there for a dedicated server would be required for such a thing.

Depends on approach, technology, development, speed of scalability i.e. how fast you're growing. To start off, shared hosting will do just fine.

Steve32 said:

I am preparing to build a site and start a eCommerce business, I find many people say shared hosting is good and economical, but I'm wondering if it is enough for a b2c ecommerce site?

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It all depends on the hosting company, what resources they give you, what the site is built with, the traffic it is getting and some other things.

Some shared hosting companies have poor resources, equipment, service and more so I would stay away from those. Some are way better than others and should have no problem with supporting your site in most cases.

It all depends on what you are getting and from who.

I would always advise against hosting an E-Commerce website on a shared hosting server. I understand that there might be budget constraints while starting a new E-Commerce business, but it would always be advisable to start with a small vps and gradually move to a larger infrastructure when the business permits. There is always a security risk in shared hosting and nobody would like a new business to get affected due to this.