Online shopping has become everyone’s favorite now.
Whether it’s apparel, furniture, electronics, online courses, or anything that is shoppable, we love buying online.
The reason is the variety of commodities available, the convenience of checking them out with just a few clicks on our smartphone without having to commute, along with easy online payments. And if they don’t like the product, they can exchange or ask for a refund if eligible.
All these things are hard to achieve with physical shopping. Therefore, e-commerce businesses are thriving, and the year 2020 has even more boosted their usage due to the lockdown that everyone in the world suffered.
So, if you have something to sell, be it any products or services using your skills, now is the time to start your business without pondering so much.
It’s because starting a business is effortless, thanks to the technology we have today. There are so many services that help build your digital store and add marketing methods, shipping methods, payment processes, and more.
One such technology is osCommerce that can help your dream of owning an online store to become a reality.
So, let’s talk about it more and find the reason why you should consider it.
What is osCommerce?
osCommerce is an open-source shopping cart system for an online store. It is the oldest and one of the most comprehensive shopping carts available in the market.
This digital store management software is equipped with many useful features, customization options, and flexibility to suit the storeowners of varying needs. This program’s main requirements are PHP and MySQL, and it is completely free to use under the GNU General Public License.
Using osCommerce, you can manage your store’s different aspects from account management, marketing, payment, discounts, shipping, and more.
Features
- Product catalog management, where you can add unlimited products, manufactures, product attributes, and categories
- Customer management
- Special offers
- Language and currency settings
- Tax handling
- Extension with various modules and plugins
- Reports
- Order processing
- Advanced tools like cache control, banner control, database backups, security checks, etc.
Why should you consider osCommerce?
osCommerce offers a multitude of benefits for its users, such as:
- The platform is flexible to customize your website’s various aspects, from the appearance with beautiful templates to 9k addons.
- Their community of over 300k store owners, service providers, and developers can help you with your store.
- If you offer services across multiple continents and countries, you need to have multiple payment options. This is why they support integration with many gateways, including PayPal, Sage Pay, Pay Nova, and more.
- Simple product management allows you to upload products without any confusion and arrange them the way you want. You can track customer preference and offer services and products accordingly, create an extensive customer database and reports, including their browser and purchase history.
All these benefits qualify osCommerce to be a good choice for your eCommerce store.
Once you are ready to use osCommerce, you need a reliable hosting platform to host your online store. There are plenty of options, and it can be confusing at times to choose the best one. But not to worry, here are some of the preferred platform to host your osCommerce shop.
A2 Hosting
A2 Hosting is known for its impeccably fast website hosting solutions, amongst other functionalities. Boost your SEO rankings, conversion rates, and improve bounce rates with their screaming-fast SwiftServer platform.
Their servers are optimized for performance wherever you are located, provides free SSDs, and LiteSpeed server. You can also go for another option – a Turbo server that is 20 times faster, featuring NVMEe drives and AMD EPYC servers.
As a result, you get 40% faster performance out of your CPU, 9 times more traffic, 2 times faster TTFB, and 3x faster write/read speed. Setting up of the osCommerce software is easy with just one click with Softaculous that comes along in the control panel.
They also notify you of new software versions when it comes via emails, after which you can update with a single click. Their Perpetual security standards help protect your site from hacks and other online threats. It includes HackScan Protection for free that blocks hackers in real-time, KernelCare updates, a two-way firewall, brute force defense, DDoS protection, and more security features.
Empower your developers with multiple tools available in multiple versions such as Apache, FTP and SFTP, PHP, MySQL, MariaDB, Node.js, Python, PERL, PostgreSQL, SSH access, and SSL.
A2 Hosting also covers you with free account migration, 99.90% uptime, and a 30-day money-back guarantee. Their pricing is one of the most affordable ones in the market, which starts at just $2.99/month for 1 site and 100GB SSD space and extends up to $14.99 for exclusive features.
TMD Hosting
Due to the fast, secure, and reliable services of TMD Hosting, it has become one of the leading choices for osCommerce hosting. And this is probably why osCommerce itself recommends it to users. So, let them handle all the heavy lifting of installing and managing osCommerce software for you.
And if you have already hosted your store elsewhere, you can seek their help for site migration, which comes absolutely free. Speaking of performance, they combine three cache layers with Varnish, OPCache, and APC over the highest-quality SSD hardware to ensure your site runs at 16 times more speed.
With the most recent osCommerce coupled with PHP7, you get the top-notch performance and hassle-free site experience with a 99.99% uptime guarantee. TMD Hosting is developer-friendly, which is why you get standard SSH access in addition to git version controls.
Apart from this, you get domain registration for free and premium support. Get more features and functionalities for your online store with free plugin installations for osCommerce. They install Cash Desk, and you can add eBay Manager, CCGV Gift Voucher, shipping price discounts, Mailchimp Newsletter, EasyLogo, and more plugins that are useful and available free for you.
Using their free installation for osCommerce templates, you can design your shop as you please. It supports Edify, Magnus, MegaStore, Dresscode, OSMART, and more. With their experience of 10 years, they offer regular updates to keep your store up to date for security, performance, and new feature additions.
Keep your online store safe with a web-based firewall by BitNinja for exceptional security from risks like malware. They snap multiple copies daily for your hosting database along with files every week so that you never lose your data. And the best thing is both daily, and weekly backups are free.
The starting price of TMD Hosting is $2.95/month. Other price variants are available at $4.95/month and $7.95/month for extra functionality.
AccuWebHosting
Start your online store with the highly scalable hosting services by AccuWebHosting. They have 17 years of experience in this field, and their experts can help you with anything, no matter its template setup, add-ons, upgrades, or transfers.
They use SSD storage in redundant RAID-6 arrays in their shared hosting services to deliver 200% greater page loading time for a smooth end-user experience. Get “0-click installation” of osCommerce software, meaning they pre-install the software in your current domain coupled with essential add-ons.
AccuWebHosting never restricts you from accessing the osCommerce database or source code; instead, you can customize it based on your needs. Manage your folders and files easily using the efficient cPanel, and handle your database via phpMyAdmin.
They host your online store in a hosting environment powered by a rock-solid combination of LiteSpeed Web Server, Pure SSDs, and CloudLinux OS (the number 1 commercial OS optimized for performance). AccuWebHosting isolates your hosting account from other accounts hosted on the exact server to build a stable and reliable hosting environment.
This way, one single site won’t be able to over-utilize server resources. Apart from that, your site would be safe from attacks like malware, SQL injection, cookie hijacking, and other threats. Furthermore, they also provide you with multi-layer DDoS protection to your osCommerce store.
In the level-1 or server-level protection, your server would be optimized and safe with Kernel Level tweaks, configured WebServer, and Mod_Security. In the level-2 or hardware firewall level, your server will be separated from the rest of the web through a hardware firewall that can detect attacks automatically and mitigate up to 1-5 Gbps DDoS threats.
If you are not familiar with how to migrate your site hosted in another web hosting account, let the team of AccuWebHosting do it for you for free. With your store’s growth, it becomes easy for you to scale your resources up with your hosting plan at any time.
All the shared hosting account on AccuWebHosting get daily backups, and they also retain multiple copies of the same along with the restoration of recent backups if you need them. Don’t worry if you are based in any country; you will get the best services because they have data centers located in 5 continents globally, including countries like India, the USA, the UK, Singapore, Australia, South Africa.
All their osCommerce hosting plans include PHP, Perl, Python support, MySQL database support, 300 scripts installed with 1-click, Google applications integration, and 99.90% uptime, POP3, SMTP, or IMAP support, and more.
The pricing for AccuWebHosting starts at $3.49/month for an unlimited website (not 1 site), 10 GB SSD storage, free SSL, 500 GB bandwidth, and 30-days money-back guarantee.
Cloudways
Enjoy the scalable infrastructure and managed PHP-supported servers by Cloudways to host your osCommerce store. They never put you in trouble while setting up your cloud hosting server as everything is smooth and easy.
Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting platform that lets you choose to host your online business on Google Cloud, AWS, DigitalOcean, Vultr, and Linode. You need to choose PHP stack while launching your server, and you’re all set to install your osCommerce software. They provide you with the flexibility of choosing the PHP version.
Their osCommerce hosting infrastructure is designed for scaled ability, so you don’t need to worry anymore regarding the exceeding resources. They include “no-contract” services, which do not bind you.
Protect your store with one 1-click using a free SSL certificate by Let’s Encrypt, or use a 3rd-party SSL of your preference. Apart from these, you get lots of integrated tools, CDN add-on, unlimited app installations, dedicated firewalls, staging environments, auto-healing servers, an advanced cache, security patching, HTTP/2-enabled servers, SFTP, and SSH access.
Conclusion
Ecommerce businesses have lots of scopes these days. So, if you want to sell products or services online, it’s time for you to get started today and leverage the vast internet to make handsome income through an online store.
And to keep it performing well without hassles, choose any of the above-mentioned osCommerce hosting providers to begin your online selling journey. If you want to explore the osCommerce alternative, you can try PrestaShop, Magento, and Sylius.
