Before the advent of the Internet anyone who wanted to operate a business that involved selling goods of any sort needed to have an actual physical storefront. Meaning someone needed to be staffing it all times, and your customer base tended to be people who were close by. Plus they’d need to be leasing the property unless they owned it, but most don’t have that advantage when they’re just starting out. But now that we all have the connectivity of the world wide web one advantage that every small business retailer has is that they can sell their products online if that’s what they choose to do. This leads to us looking at WooCommerce hosting in Canada.
The reason being that WooCommerce is the top WordPress plugin for online stores, and it’s really become almost a default option for anyone who is putting together an online store and skipping all the challenges and expenses that come with having an actual store. Of course many retailers will be doing both, but generally those retailers will have enough of an established client base that they don’t need to be fine-tuning their approach to online retail. Those who have smaller operations - and are likely to stay smaller - are going to be the ones who benefit most from having the WooCommerce plugin installed for their website.
Here at 4GoodHosting we are as good a choice as any for the best WooCommerce hosting in Canada, and especially if you choose to go with Managed WordPress hosting for your small business website if it’s built on the WordPress platform. You continue to be free to have whichever plugins you like installed on your site, but the ongoing optimization of it and everything needed for maximum performance, security, and infrastructure revisioning is taken care of for you by your Canadian hosting provider.
There’s likely to already be wind in your sails if you’re just starting out, and especially if you’ve got a product or service that’s bound to be attractive to people once they become aware of you making it available for purchase online. The WooCommerce plugin will help you manage those sales most effectively, and for a lot of online retailer who are new to this type of commercial venture it’s a very valuable asset to have for the site. PIPEDA compliance will be a consideration to if it’s an eCommerce site, and our hosting is a match for that too.
So what we’ll do with this week’s blog entry here is talk about WooCommerce hosting in Canada and what you need for a high-traffic online store. Because if you do have what people want and your prices are right then you will start to get that kind of traffic coming your way.
Right Choices
The biggest gain when you build with WooCommerce is the choices that are available to you. With most SaaS platforms you are forced to use their servers regardless of performance, but with WooCommerce you have the flexibility to choose, switch, or leave a host whenever you choose to. It’s very possible to outgrow your hosting arrangement, but with WooCommerce hosting in Canada you’re not locked in. This is good, because most hosting companies design their plans for general WordPress sites and that’s usually a fine fit for blogs or static websites. Online stores are different though, and they have unique needs that come from having to support heavy product catalogs, secure (and fast) checkout processes, and those welcome but sometimes problematic traffic spikes.
Often how well your site is going to work with PHP workers is a primary deciding factor. These are mechanisms that take all the code your site is built with and then compiles it and renders it as HTML for your customer’s browser. Each customer visit, checkout process, etc., will require a single PHP worker active behind the scenes. The Best WooCommerce hosting Canada will have at least dedicated 5-10 PHP workers.
Object caching is going to be a foremost consideration too. With every site page built by a PHP worker it becomes necessary to access the dynamic content of your store. Content like the product description, price, SKU, and inventory. That information will be coming from your database kept on the host’s server, and it’s used to serve the content back to the PHP worker. Object caching will save those answers so your database doesn’t need to answer them every time.
Sites lacking an object caching mechanism because it’s not available through the web host will be slowed down because PHP workers will have to fetch the content on every page request. It’s for this reason that most providers will have a CDN (content distribution network) set up as part of their managed web Canadian hosting platform. This type of site infrastructure supports
both the static assets of your website, like product images and the rendered HTML pages of your site.
Most often they will be set up for vertical site scaling. WooCommerce online stores that do well will see traffic spikes, and if they occur frequently enough it means that a site may need to be scaled in order to better accommodate them from that point forward. Ideally this will be the new operating reality for the site, as it will means you’re selling plenty more of whatever it is you have. Vertical scaling ensures that your host can handle these spikes automatically, without your intervention.
Growth Stages
It’s helpful to look at WooCommerce hosting by framing it around needs as a online store website experiences growth. Tier 1 will be the starter store. At this stage you don’t need dedicated servers or real-time backups and instead you’ll be best off with WooCommerce pre-installed, SSL, automatic backups, and an uptime guarantee that means you can count on your site being available to visitors / customers at all times and for anywhere they happen to be coming from.
Fortunately most Canadian hosting providers tend to have infrastructure made for WordPress and WooCommerce. As a store grows you can upgrade to more robust options. Get onboard with us and our Managed WordPress hosting and do what nearly every other online retailer does - install the WooCommerce plugin on your site.
Tier 2 with the need for WooCommerce hosting in Canada will be the growing store. Here we’re talking about online eCommerce sites that are generating $10,000 to $500,000 a month with over 1,000 daily visitors. It could also be those with big seasonal traffic spikes. One thing that’s going to not be debatable for sites at this point is that a slow checkout on the site is something that simply can’t happen. Here what you want is vertical scaling that kicks in automatically, object caching, a built-in CDN, and support staff who can actually read and diagnose a WooCommerce stack trace.
Your web host can be manually adjusting PHP-FPM settings or adjusting things like `innodb_buffer_pool_size` at this volume if it’s necessary, and most of them will be using resources like Pressable or Convesio for that purpose. Both are very good for handling traffic spikes by adding more resources to support your potential customers. Convesio is especially good because it puts each website in its own Docker container. If you’re in shared hosting then another site’s traffic spike won’t affect yours.
Tier 3 will be the big store, and this will means ones with multi-million annual revenue, a global audience, and a need for solidly-defined SLAs. For those ones web hosting is as much about legal and business needs as it is about technology and PIPEDA compliance will almost certainly be a must given the information they collect from purchasing customers. These eCommerce sites will also usually need custom SLAs, compliance documentation (SOC 2, GDPR, PCI), dedicated infrastructure, and assigned migration and optimization support.
Multi-region coverage needs tend to be standard, and usually what’s best for these sites is to exist on a bigger enterprise platform. One that supports publishers and retailers who get hundreds of thousands of requests per second while having big events. Another standard recommendation is to avoid generic shared hosting that won’t be compatible with the WooCommerce plugin. Your cart, checkout, and account pages may not be regularly and properly cached.
Outgrown Hosting
Even with Managed WordPress hosting it may become a situation where your site has outgrown it and it’s time to move to VPS hosting for your eCommerce store. A VPS can also qualify as part of the Best WooCommerce hosting in Canada and in fact that the exclusive resource availability may make the plugin function better overall. This will be the case for any online store that is growing in both sales and functionality. We’ll conclude this week’s blog entry about web hosting with the WooCommerce plugin by listing some common indicators that it’s time to move to VPS hosting for an online store website:
- The checkout’s time to first byte (TTFB) is consistently over 800ms
- WP Admin becomes slow after exceeding 5,000 products or 10,000 orders
- The site slows or crashes during a promotion and ‘502 Bad Gateway’ messages are displayed to site visitors who are then unable to have landing pages load for them
- SSH access isn’t provided your web host
- Being hit with overage fees
We’re happy to discuss affordable web hosting plans for eCommerce stores with anyone who’s preparing to take their business online and is aiming to do so with the right mix of reliability, performance, and cost-effectiveness. Contact us with your inquiries and we’ll be speedy with replying and putting you in the know with everything related to web hosting for an online store in Canada.
