Where do you start when choosing an ecommerce hosting provider? There are many options out there but the first thing you should do is to find some reviews to see which providers to include in a top 10 list.

Following that, visit each one in turn and check to see they are fulfilling all your requirements, including those listed below.

Finally, create a shortlist of three and contact their support desks. Are they responsive, helpful, knowledgeable? Dismiss any that do not come up to standard.

The basic requirements for ecommerce hosting are the same as for any hosting service, you need:

* Greater than 99.5% uptime
* 24/7 support, preferably including online chat facilities
* At least 10 email accounts, many hosts offer more
* Anti spam facilities for your email accounts
* Support for CGI, ASP, PHP/MySQL and any other languages you may wish to use
* Facility to add sub domains for future expansion
* Good built in statistics reporting packages such as AWStats or Webalizer

and finally,

* Minimum bandwidth of at least 5Gb per month
* Minimum disk space of at least 5Mb

But these last two will vary according to the size of your site. Choose an ecommerce hosting option that is easily scalable if you expect a large increase in traffic or plan to increase the size of your web site significantly.

In addition to the above you need to look for ecommerce hosting packages that include the following to help you specifically configure your ecommerce site:

* Shopping cart software, commonly Zen cart is included to make managing customer payments easy.
* Autoresponder accounts to automatically reply to customer queries with standard answers or to create customer lists of potential prospects.
* SSL secure server facilities so that customers’ personal details are encrypted and security protected.

Unfortunately many of these requirements are compromised by opting for a free hosting service, especially those for disk space and bandwidth. You have to invest in a professional ecommerce hosting service to properly support your business.

Ecommerce hosting need not be expensive though take a look at somebody like Hostgator for a good idea of what is available at a reasonable price.

You should be able to produce a quality shortlist of potential ecommerce hosting suppliers now. The only thing left to do is to seek out customer reviews of your chosen favorite, perhaps in forums or discussion groups.

Trevor Sadowski has been creating ecommerce web sites for several years now and his experience of ecommerce hosting is included in a free 7 part mini series located at his web site.