osCommerce is an online shop e-commerce solution that offering a wide range of useful features that allows online stores to be functioning at a fast pace with ease, and is available for free as an Open Source based solution released under the GNU General Public License.

OsCommerce has been developing on a frequent basis to provide value adding solutions to its customers, continously making it easier for the store administrators to provide their stores to their customers catering to their unique requirements.

osCommerce is still in its development stage with a an objective to provide and improve many new features. Below mentioned are some of the features of osCommerce:

Basic Functionality :

• All features are enabled by default
• Object oriented backend
• It is Multilingual with English, German and Spanish provided by default
• It is compatible with all PHP 4 versions.

Installation :

• It is easy to install
• Web-browser based automatic installation and upgrade procedures

Layout :

• Allows layout changes to be adaptive and easy to make
• Allows easy integration into an existing site
• Provides support for dynamic images

Administration /  Functionality :

• osCommerce supports unlimited products and categories
• Categories, products, manufacturers, customers and reviews can be Added/Edited/Removed
• Support is provided for Physical (Shippable) and Virtual (Downloadable) products
• Administration is secured with a Username and Password
• Customers can be contacted directly via newletters or email
• Backup and restore the database for easily
• Genarate statistics for products and customers
• Multilingual and Multicurrency support
• Currency exchange rates are automatically updated
• Support for static and dynamic banners with full statistics

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Ecommerce business are now the best business that revolves around the world . This Ecommerce is now supported by the Hosting companies and called as ecommerce hosting. Ecommerce Hosting is a business where a company provides other companies whatever they want to make effective marketing to sell their products and services on the Web. Which includes the web server to serve the pages.

Ecommerce usually involves providing the templates for building virtual stores on the online catalogs, shopping carts, credit card purchasing, tools for tracking and managing inventory.

There are many types of ecommerce hosting in the market with many if different packages. The user must be smart enough to pick the good one in the terms of Good service of the company and the budget of the hosting plan. Some particular things that should be looked for in ecommerce hosting are the risks involved in the ecommerce being shared with the third party company, so it is necessary to check the companies reputation.

Ecommerce Web hosting has emerged as a good option in the business in the India, many web hosting companies provide the hosting with the full security to the data and good support 24×7. One thing is very important to take care of, when you are sharing the critical business data with the hosting company and your whole business is in the hands of the hosting company, you should also take a regular back up for the safety purpose. These businesses includes money transfer through the internet, this is also a big risk, so you should be careful here too.

Ecommerce Web hosting companies in India are best in dealing with these types of services, manage all the aspects of creating and maintaining a commercial web site for its customers. These business as earlier stated are very critical  and contains very secret information that is to be secured at the best, which contains dynamic content, database application and ecommerce multimedia application. Generally this type of hosting requirements are fulfilled by the Dedicated Server hosting which provides high security, reliability , safe hosting, good performance and speed and best use of the network resources.

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A web hosting provider is chosen based on technology, prices at which they offer services or through a recommendation of an agency or person. But, there are more aspects that need to be covered while choosing an appropriate web hosting service provider.

First of all, it is very important to educate yourself about certain basics of web hosting. Please refer the following link to understand them : Basics of Web Hosting

When choosing a web host, it is important to understand the tools and services that the web hosting provider offer. Further it is necessary for you to check if they offer support for those tools. Whether they offer website statistic tools alongwith the web hosting packages. If they do, understand how reliable is it.

Choosing a web hosting provider that offers a website building tool can prove to be advantageous. You can develop the website on your own by using such tools in a search engine friendly manner. Building a website with such tools from an Search Engines point of view can be easily achieved by this.

It is equally important to check if the web hosting service provider offers eCommerce hosting solutions as well. If your website involves sales and purchase eCommerce support tools are necessary. Online transactions is common in an eCommerce website, so it is necessary for you to check if your web hosting service provider offers SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificate as well. You must check for the packages that support eCommerce websites, due to lack of customer knowledge, many hosting providers pitch in hard for you to purchase a dedicated server, which is many a times not required, but inorder to meet their sales targets they are bound to do so.

You must also check if the web hosting provider offers flexibility in the web hosting plans. By this I mean, you should have the flexibility to upgrade or downgrade the web hosting plans at any point of time.

A web hosting provider should have effective firewall protection for the servers. They should also be in a position to offer dedicated firewalls to the clients if demanded. This is important due to the ever increasing numbers of hackers, attackers and spammers. They should also offer reliable E-mail delivery tools. There are chances that the IP of the server gets blacklisted due to spammers carrying out unhealthy practices from search engines point of view. Therefore, it is necessary to have effective server monitoring tools to avoid such situations.

The most crucial of all is the server uptime offered by the web hosting provider. It is very important that the web host offers maximum uptime of their servers. They should respect the fact that every minute is crucial for your business. An uptime of 99.95% can be considered to be satisfactory. After the uptime is confirmed, the server performance should be taken into consideration. It is necessary that the web hosting provider use Branded hardware to host your website.

I do not say that you should neglect the basic traditional criteria’s such as bandwidth, diskspace and the cost, but the above mentioned criteria’s are equally important.

Lastly it is necessary to know the quality of post sales support offered by web hosting provider.

It is recommended that before you choose a web hosting provider, you contant them via Live Chat, Phone or E-mail, get all these aspects cleared and only then sign-up for a package with them.

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