Select a Hosting Company
One of the first and most important steps in setting up your new Amazon Store is selecting a reasonably-priced and reliable internet hosting company. There are thousands of firms to choose from and you can spend hundreds of hours slogging through marketing materials and user reviews to find the host that “best” meets your needs.
Most people starting out will want to select a “shared” service provider – meaning that you will be renting a portion of a computer server for your website(s) but will be sharing the server with hundreds (perhaps thousands) of other websites. Shared hosting is fine for most starter websites. But if you should be fortunate enough to experience big-time traffic growth, you will want to upgrade to a “dedicated” server environment. This will provide visitors with more rapid page loads and generally better service.
Keep in mind too that with a little bit of work you can always change hosting companies (or, easier yet, upgrade service levels with the same host). So, starting with an inexpensive, bare bones hosting service isn’t necessarily a bad idea if you’re testing the waters and aren’t sure of how much time and effort you’ll be able to commit to your Amazon Store.
We’ve had personal experience with the following two hosting companies:
Of the two, Hostgator has better technical support and generally seems to be more reliable and hassle-free. However, 1and1 often has very good specials (even free hosting for extended periods) which can allow you to set up a site at little or now cost.
Another benefit of 1and1 is that they offer very inexpensive domain purchase and registry. Domain names are typically available for $6.99 per year and are often discounted (for some categories) to $2.99 or even lower. For the beginner, being able to purchase and register a domain name and have it set up all with one hosting company is a big time saver.
There are thousands of hosting choices available to you and it wouldn’t be hard to get overwhelmed and frustrated just trying to find the hosting service that “best” meet your needs. Don’t let this happen.
For the small investment involved (and given the fact that you can always change later), it just isn’t worth spending an inordinate amount of time on this decision. Get an account set up at a recommended hosting service, then get on to the fun stuff: setting up your own niche Amazon store!
We can honestly recommend either of the services noted above; better yet, if you have a trusted personal acquaintance who knows their way around the web, ask them for their hosting recommendation.