Bandwidth: this is the first place where you may encounter problems. Many of the cheap ecommerce hosting companies provide very little bandwidth – which is most viable for private sites such as personal pages. Then they will charge for any additional bandwidth requirement, and you find at the end of the month you will have the bandwidth charges many times higher than the cost of the hosting itself.
Too many accounts per server: those who offer cheap ecommerce hosting will crowd a great number of shared accounts on one server which will be easily overworked. This will make your site very slow and/or unavailable quite often.
Cutting off on the basics: in order to keep within the low costs, the cheap ecommerce hosting will cut corners on some of the basics, such as timely and regular up gradation, email service, toll-free home, auto responders to name a few. Depending on where your online business is at, some of these basics, or lack thereof, may really sabotage all your chances for success.
This is why it is always advisable to invest a little extra in the web hosting because this is indeed one of the critical features of your ecommerce site. A quality ecommerce host can make the difference between success and failure for your business. Hence, it is better to have a professional web host to charges you a bit extra, but assures you of the minimum basics required by your business.
A few basic features that I look for when I choose an ecommerce hosting company are: they should offer cPanel for the control panel; they should offer Fantastico so you can automatically install some of the more popular programs; at least 50 gigabytes of bandwidth and offer at least 1 gigabyte of storage. These are just some suggestions but many people find that they want these to be helpful.
Last but not least you should find out what other people think of the ecommerce host you are thinking about for your website. There are many forums on the internet where people give opinions and tell about their experiences.