Challenges of Hosting a Magento Store or WooCommerce Store (Interview)

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Hello Daugirdas, tell us a bit about yourself and the company.

Hello! I am Chief Marketing Officer at Hostinger, one of the fastest-growing web hosting providers worldwide.

I joined Hostinger more than 3 years ago. We were a small company back then, but we managed to grow to almost 800 employees at the moment. I would like to also mention that we are a bootstrapped company – we never received external investment.

My main goal is to drive growth for Hostinger by building and scaling new user acquisition initiatives. I have participated in creating the majority of Hostingerโ€™s marketing channels and strategies. 70+ marketing professionals from 40+ countries are working in our marketing department.

Image usage rights belong to Hostinger

What is a web host, and what should you look for in one for Ecommerce sites?

Simply put, a web host helps your online projects get and stay online. If you are planning to launch a website, it has to be stored somewhere to be accessible for everyone surfing the web. Web hosting companies are taking care of this.

If you are looking for a company to host your Ecommerce website, pay attention to web hosting requirements, especially to the speed and quality of customer service and overall performance of a web host. While creating your site, you may run into trouble, so you want help to be there and really easy to access. You need a web host which is fast. Website speed is important for all kinds of online projects, but especially – Ecommerce sites. Also, if your project starts scaling, you want an infrastructure that is able to support the growth.

What are the most important things to consider when choosing a hosting company for a Magento or WooCommerce store?

The basic things are the same as for all the websites – you want a reliable web host, which will be able to support you during the different stages of your project lifetime.

The majority of the companies, including Hostingerโ€™s plans, are offering risk-free money-back guarantees – use those to test the speed of the support and overall performance of the web host. If you will pick a partner and the speed of their infrastructure will become an early bottleneck for your project, you might face a lot of trouble and might even fail to lift-off with your project. I believe that support quality plays a huge role in choosing your hosting provider. In Hostinger, we prioritize the customer’s problems they are dealing with and trying to help as much as possible – our support heroes work 24/7/365 without any exceptions.

Image usage rights belong to Hostinger

In terms of security, which platform you think poses the most challenges?

In my personal opinion, both platforms are as popular as they are for a reason. They are well-developed and maintained. I think it is up to the maintainer of the WooCommerce/Magento stores to keep them safe and secure. If you will not spend enough time and effort to keep the platform up-to-date, eventually it may become insecure – no matter whether you are running WooCommerce or Magento or just a simple website.

How important is site speed for an Ecommerce website?

It is one of the most important factors of a successful Ecommerce website. First of all, nowadays users do not have time and patience to wait for slow websites to load. If your website is slow, most probably your target user will find another place to shop. Moreover, this shift in user preferences shapes site speed as a major ranking factor for SEO.

If you want to be discovered and trusted by your potential customers – take website speed seriously. If you pick a fast web host, you will be able to provide your users with good experience and rank high for your focus keywords.

When should you consider upgrading your hosting plan?

You should not wait to hit the max cap of your hosting plan quota. It may be already too late to upgrade and you might be already losing some business due to downgraded performance of your site. Take some time in measuring your current resource usage and estimate what you will need within 2-3 months. If your projections are getting close to the maximum cap of your current web hosting plan quota, you can start considering an upgrade. What is more, if you plan these changes in advance, you might get a good deal from your current provider, or spend some time to research a potential new web hosting provider you could move to. You can dive deeper into this topic in one of my last interviews, which covered this topic more comprehensively.

Whatโ€™s Hostingerโ€™s take on renewable energy? If Iโ€™m running an ethical store can I assure my clients that my servers are carbon neutral?

We do promote a sustainable way of living – starting from recycling and finishing with renewable energy. We do a number of activities to minimize the overall carbon footprint that we produce. Some of our data centers are using renewable energy, but I cannot say for sure that we are carbon neutral. We do believe that eventually, the majority of companies will need to switch to renewable energy, Hostinger including.

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