ProfesionalHosting Offers Hosting Services and Open-Source Tools to Help Ecommerce Businesses Grow

TL; DR: For nearly 20 years, ProfesionalHosting has provided primarily Spanish-speaking entrepreneurs with low-cost hosting services that range from shared hosting to dedicated options. The company has found success in delivering robust ecommerce websites using proven open-source technologies. ProfesionalHosting’s highly rated support team and customer-driven development cycle help it prepare for the AI-driven automation that’s likely to change the ecommerce market.

In the early days of the open web, some hosting companies offered free hosting in exchange for placing advertisements on websites. That market was difficult for some hosting providers, and they often struggled to provide quality and stability to their free clients.

Providers, including Geocities and Blogger, did well enough on the consumer side. Still, businesses needed more precise ecommerce tools, including shopping carts, that those early free platforms just didn’t serve.

ProfesionalHosting launched in 2003 as an ad-supported hosting provider, but it saw that the free-hosting market didn’t align with ecommerce. So it decided to shift its focus to reliable and affordable paid hosting solutions for the individuals and businesses that needed them. Today, the company has more than 20,000 mostly Spanish-speaking clients and is a part of MissHosting, a multinational hosting group.

“The market has increasingly demanded higher-quality services, better technical support, and more specialized services,” said David Garcia, Founder of ProfesionalHosting. “We’ve been working on all three fronts. We focus on stability, improving our infrastructure at the best possible cost to speed up customer sites and ecommerce.”

ProfesionalHosting offers technical solutions beyond typical shared hosting vendors. It has been one of the few hosts in its class to specialize in open-source solutions — primarily WordPress and PrestaShop. ProfesionalHosting customers can select from several different hosting options, including shared, VPS, and dedicated servers. The company also offers an array of security services with its hosting plans.

ProfesionalHosting aims to retain clients through its rich product catalog and ensure customers of every size and experience level enjoy ideal service packages that can scale.

“The customer doesn’t have to change suppliers as they grow,” David said. “We can help them along the way, no matter where their journey takes them.”

The current hosting market often sends mixed signals to customers looking for a hosting partner to nurture their business. Modern hosting has generally settled on similar types of offerings — shared-server accounts with cPanel hosting or a virtual private server — that appear at relatively similar price-and-feature points.

That means the top-line value proposition for most providers is relatively equal. Hosting providers must then distinguish themselves based on value-adds, including niche products or customer service.

“We have worked on helping customers and going further than what simple hosts offer,” David said. “We are a technological resource for our customers, and we always look for solutions to their problems.”

ProfesionalHosting specializes in open-source software frameworks — especially WordPress and PrestaShop. WordPress powers a significant portion of the internet, and an estimated 40% to 65% of all sites use the popular content management system. PrestaShop delivers a rich shopping cart and inventory service with a freemium model for smaller operations.

“We were one of the first companies in the world to focus on open-source hosting, particularly for ecommerce solutions,” he said.

The upside to emphasizing open-source ecommerce is that all of the relevant platforms in that space are well-vetted and richly supported. WordPress, for example, permits various shopping carts as plugins, including WooCommerce, while PrestaShop delivers powerful stand-alone cart solutions. Each open-source vendor enjoys a diverse ecosystem of plugin and template vendors.

For example, WordPress has thousands of plugins — free and paid — and even the WooCommerce plugin includes hundreds of its own plugins. That flexibility helps sellers configure an environment that best serves their market.

“Most of our customers are focused on selling on the internet. Our core offering is solutions for the customer to sell their products online and not have to worry in the future about changing companies or scaling their service,” David said. “That’s because we have many options for it. We have clients of all types and sizes.”

One upshot to using open-source tools is that they tend to be scalable without additional cost or friction. For example, a WordPress or PrestaShop storefront can extend to hundreds or thousands of catalog items and transact tens of thousands of dollars per hour — or it can support one or two sales every few months.

That flexibility means customers aren’t locked into sliding fee scales. If they need to upgrade servers to keep up with increasing volume, that process is often accomplished through a simple replication rather than a complex and costly rebuild.

Because those tools are so well-vetted with large user communities, storefront admins who struggle with their platforms or plugins generally find easy access to solid documentation or peer support. However, an entirely self-service support model isn’t ideal for everyone, especially entrepreneurs who’d rather sell products than spend time troubleshooting.

“We are constantly working to improve the quality of our technical service, with frequent customer surveys and satisfaction rates that exceed 95%,” David said. “This impacts everything — better performance, better return on investment, and time savings.”

In addition to responsive support, ProfesionalHosting uses customer feedback to inform its long-term product road map.

“We are constantly listening to our customers,” David said. “That means new needs arise constantly, so internally, we have an R&D department where we develop new products based on suggestions for improvement.”

Among ecommerce hosts, ProfesionalHosting’s Spanish-language focus, plus its fast support and customer-focused product development, makes it an ideal option for companies of any size.

Its hosting options range from standard cPanel shared accounts to scripted deployments of many open-source platforms. VPS solutions rely on Plesk or cPanel, while dedicated servers include Linux and Elastic Cloud Private. Its audio and video servers support unlimited listeners or viewers and unlimited data transfer.

All of those tools are open-source, trusted by the community, and optimized to scale without additional cost or complexity.

When ProfesionalHosting got its start as an ad-supported free hosting provider, the ecosystem hadn’t yet settled. When it did, that model didn’t serve individuals or businesses well, so the company pivoted to paid hosting. Then, it put its effort into providing high-quality open-source software to primarily Spanish-speaking customers.

Today, the company delivers a full suite of products to support ecommerce vendors of any size and complexity. ProfesionalHosting’s rapid and effective support team can help solve problems beyond what individual customers can manage, while feedback shapes its long-term product road map.

ProfesionalHosting is now trying to anticipate what the next generation of tech advancement will do to the ecommerce sector.

“It’s important to decide in whom you place your trust as the market evolves,” David said. “In the next 10 years, we will see major changes in the world of the internet, big data, and artificial intelligence.”

Many people look to major companies, including Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, and Google, as the market leaders in AI-driven sales recommendations. David said he believes that soon, the power will flow to independent ecommerce companies. And when that functionality arrives, ProfesionalHosting intends to be prepared to capitalize on it.

“We continuously evaluate how to improve our products and try to be one step ahead of the market,” he said.

For ecommerce entrepreneurs eager for a long-term partner, particularly one fluent in Spanish, ProfesionalHosting offers a solid value proposition.