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Communication Address : 73 Sturbridge Lane Trumbull, CT 06611 URL : http://www.innovationsgaming.com Phone No. : 203-258-0060
Monday, March 5, 2007
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
How to Choose a Web Hosting Plan for E-commerce Websites
The requirements for E-commerce websites are determined by the characteristics of online operations and the need for conducting transaction online. An e-commerce hosting plan you choose should have the flexibility for customization, the capacity for handling the web traffic, and the functionality of online shopping cart for online catalog and online payment processing.
Online Operation and Hosting Capacity
An e-commerce website should be running smoothly in order for customers to make purchase. There're many things to consider while investigating the hosting capacity for your site: 1) What are the preferred programming languages for your developers? Once you've picked up the programming languages for your Web development, you still have freedom to choose the operating system that hosts your Websites. 2) What is the preferred hosting platform? Is it hosted on Unix, Windows or Linux? The decision depends on whether you want to use, install or migrate certain applications. For instance, if you plan to run SendMail, an email program, you won't get this on Windows. If your custom applications are developed in ASP scripting language, you can't run them on Unix. Besides ASP which works only on Microsoft Windows, PHP, JSP and PERL work on Windows, Unix and Linux. 3) Do you need shared hosting, managed hosting, dedicated Servers, or Virtual Private Servers (VPS)? Shared hosting is the cheapest plan, and you can host as many sites as you like with a Reseller Hosting option. VPS costs around $50 a month, and Dedicated Server plan will cost from $50 - $100 or more a month dependent on storage space and bandwidth of the hosting plan. 4) How much storage space do you want and how much bandwidth do you need? If your site offers custom business cards with lot of templates online, chances are you'll need lot of hard disk space for storing those business card templates, and lot of bandwidth as well There're tens of thousands of people searching for "business cards" online. On the other hand, if your site offers manufacturing of smart cards or membership cards, you'll need lot of storage to host the graphic templates, but you won't really need a huge bandwidth since the number of people searching for "smart cards", or "membership cards" is less than 5% of that searching for "business cards".
E-commerce Hosting Features
To evaluate e-commerce web hosting plans, first of all, you'll need to find out a list of plans that meet the needs of the functionality, then do price comparison for each plan. The comparison of functionality is often straight forward, and the comparison of cost for different e-commerce hosting solutions are dependent on both the setup fees and your transaction volume. Different hosting plans may have different free structures. Online shopping carts offer users the ability to search the products by keywords, price etc., which is a huge advantage over catalogue printing on papers. For a turnkey commerce solution, EBay Stores, Yahoo! Store and Microsoft bCentral are the most popular ones for small businesses.
To compare e-commerce functionality, the questions to ask include: 1) Whether a shopping cart accepts online check or eCheck beside support on online credit card and paypal for payment options? Whether the payment processor handle transaction in a particular country? For instance, you can't accept from and or send money to Romania with paypal, but you can do that with 2checkout. 2) Whether there's a limit on the number of products and categories that you can setup? 3) Whether it automatically sends out an email notification once an order is placed successfully?
For comparing the cost of e-commerce hosting plans, the questions to investigate include: 1) What's the basic monthly subscription fee? 2) Whether there's a setup fee for a new online store? 3) Whether you have to pay for the addition of new items to the product catalog? 4) How much it charges for each transaction? High volume sites may prefer the plans that charge a higher monthly-fee but a lower fee on each transaction, while low volume sites work better with hosting plans that charge zero or low monthly fee and initial setup fees but a slightly higher fee on each transaction.
The website is the virtual storefront for your e-commerce operation. A thorough and careful evaluation of e-commerce hosting plans is a part of ingredients to your e-commerce success.
Online Operation and Hosting Capacity
An e-commerce website should be running smoothly in order for customers to make purchase. There're many things to consider while investigating the hosting capacity for your site: 1) What are the preferred programming languages for your developers? Once you've picked up the programming languages for your Web development, you still have freedom to choose the operating system that hosts your Websites. 2) What is the preferred hosting platform? Is it hosted on Unix, Windows or Linux? The decision depends on whether you want to use, install or migrate certain applications. For instance, if you plan to run SendMail, an email program, you won't get this on Windows. If your custom applications are developed in ASP scripting language, you can't run them on Unix. Besides ASP which works only on Microsoft Windows, PHP, JSP and PERL work on Windows, Unix and Linux. 3) Do you need shared hosting, managed hosting, dedicated Servers, or Virtual Private Servers (VPS)? Shared hosting is the cheapest plan, and you can host as many sites as you like with a Reseller Hosting option. VPS costs around $50 a month, and Dedicated Server plan will cost from $50 - $100 or more a month dependent on storage space and bandwidth of the hosting plan. 4) How much storage space do you want and how much bandwidth do you need? If your site offers custom business cards with lot of templates online, chances are you'll need lot of hard disk space for storing those business card templates, and lot of bandwidth as well There're tens of thousands of people searching for "business cards" online. On the other hand, if your site offers manufacturing of smart cards or membership cards, you'll need lot of storage to host the graphic templates, but you won't really need a huge bandwidth since the number of people searching for "smart cards", or "membership cards" is less than 5% of that searching for "business cards".
E-commerce Hosting Features
To evaluate e-commerce web hosting plans, first of all, you'll need to find out a list of plans that meet the needs of the functionality, then do price comparison for each plan. The comparison of functionality is often straight forward, and the comparison of cost for different e-commerce hosting solutions are dependent on both the setup fees and your transaction volume. Different hosting plans may have different free structures. Online shopping carts offer users the ability to search the products by keywords, price etc., which is a huge advantage over catalogue printing on papers. For a turnkey commerce solution, EBay Stores, Yahoo! Store and Microsoft bCentral are the most popular ones for small businesses.
To compare e-commerce functionality, the questions to ask include: 1) Whether a shopping cart accepts online check or eCheck beside support on online credit card and paypal for payment options? Whether the payment processor handle transaction in a particular country? For instance, you can't accept from and or send money to Romania with paypal, but you can do that with 2checkout. 2) Whether there's a limit on the number of products and categories that you can setup? 3) Whether it automatically sends out an email notification once an order is placed successfully?
For comparing the cost of e-commerce hosting plans, the questions to investigate include: 1) What's the basic monthly subscription fee? 2) Whether there's a setup fee for a new online store? 3) Whether you have to pay for the addition of new items to the product catalog? 4) How much it charges for each transaction? High volume sites may prefer the plans that charge a higher monthly-fee but a lower fee on each transaction, while low volume sites work better with hosting plans that charge zero or low monthly fee and initial setup fees but a slightly higher fee on each transaction.
The website is the virtual storefront for your e-commerce operation. A thorough and careful evaluation of e-commerce hosting plans is a part of ingredients to your e-commerce success.
Web Hosting Bandwidth - How many are enough?
There are numerous hosting options out there. Most of the time, one corporation is also offering several plans where the bandwidths are different one and another. Normally, the more the better. However, if you are in a very tight budget, you might want to understand exactly how much bandwidth is enough for your website.
There is no easy way to foretell a bandwidth usage. Most search engines, like Google or Yahoo, use robots to visit your website and these robots use different bandwidth compared to human visitors. Website that use database might use different bandwidth compared to website with no database. However, let's do an easy counting to try to foretell the usage of your bandwidth.
To foretell your bandwidth, you need to build the website first. You then need to be aware of the size of each and every file. (html, image, flash, etc) If you haven't built your website, the prediction will become inaccurate as you will also need to predict how much disk space is taken by each and every file. If you haven't built your website it means that you are creating prediction based on prediction, not based on fact.
OK, let's get dirty.
Let's assume your main page is an html file with a size of 5Kb. In that page you put 2 images, the header banner is 25Kb and the footer graphic is 10Kb. You also put a flash animation in the middle of the page with 10Kb in size. That means in total, your main page takes 50Kb. So, what's next?
That means when a person visits your main page, that person takes 50Kb bandwidths. Most browsers will have a cache feature turned on. When the person visits your site, the browser downloads the contents, all 50Kb of them, to the person hard drive. If the person refreshes the browser, more often than not, the content will be taken from the cache. This means that person does not take any bandwidth for this action. Nevertheless, if the cache session is over and the person refreshes the browser, that person is taking another 50Kb bandwidths from you. Thus, from that one person, you need to prepare 100Kb. If tomorrow this same person visits your website again, most likely the cache session is over and that person will take another 50Kb bandwidths from you.
Simply put, if you are expecting 250 people visit and refresh your main page in a day, you need to prepare: 250 people x 30 days x 50Kb = 375,000Kb or 375Mb bandwidth. Notice that the counting above only includes one webpage of your website. If you expect each visitor to visits 5 web pages of your website, you need to prepare: 375Mb x 5 web pages = 1,875Mb or 1.875 GB, which is almost 2 GB bandwidth. Also, that bandwidth counting is only from human visitors, you also need to put search engines robots into consideration. You could perhaps expect one robot to visit your page once a month or once a month or even once a day if your website is that good. That means the 1.875 GB could roughly be rounded to 2 GB while taking search engine robots into consideration.
You also need to pay attention that the example above is only assuming that you will have 250 visitors a day or 7,500 visitors a month. In general, for a website to be counted as a working website, most people will agree that 100,000 visitors a month is the minimum. With that number, you need to plan: 100,000 visitors x 50Kb x 5 pages = 25,000,000 Kb or 25 GB bandwidths each month. If your website is an advanced website with lots of graphics and flash animations to make the website more beautiful, you need 200Kb for each webpage. Thus making the bandwidth 4 times bigger or 100 GB bandwidths needed each and every month. If you are successful, you could have 500,000 visitors or more each month and that will make the number even bigger.
In summary, the bandwidth you need to run your website successfully could be foretold beforehand. Several main factors you need to take into consideration while counting bandwidth are: number of visitors each month, the total size of your pages, and how many pages you have on your website. You also need to prepare additional bandwidth for search engines robots visit and several additional bandwidths that are taken when you use database such as MySQL.
There is no easy way to foretell a bandwidth usage. Most search engines, like Google or Yahoo, use robots to visit your website and these robots use different bandwidth compared to human visitors. Website that use database might use different bandwidth compared to website with no database. However, let's do an easy counting to try to foretell the usage of your bandwidth.
To foretell your bandwidth, you need to build the website first. You then need to be aware of the size of each and every file. (html, image, flash, etc) If you haven't built your website, the prediction will become inaccurate as you will also need to predict how much disk space is taken by each and every file. If you haven't built your website it means that you are creating prediction based on prediction, not based on fact.
OK, let's get dirty.
Let's assume your main page is an html file with a size of 5Kb. In that page you put 2 images, the header banner is 25Kb and the footer graphic is 10Kb. You also put a flash animation in the middle of the page with 10Kb in size. That means in total, your main page takes 50Kb. So, what's next?
That means when a person visits your main page, that person takes 50Kb bandwidths. Most browsers will have a cache feature turned on. When the person visits your site, the browser downloads the contents, all 50Kb of them, to the person hard drive. If the person refreshes the browser, more often than not, the content will be taken from the cache. This means that person does not take any bandwidth for this action. Nevertheless, if the cache session is over and the person refreshes the browser, that person is taking another 50Kb bandwidths from you. Thus, from that one person, you need to prepare 100Kb. If tomorrow this same person visits your website again, most likely the cache session is over and that person will take another 50Kb bandwidths from you.
Simply put, if you are expecting 250 people visit and refresh your main page in a day, you need to prepare: 250 people x 30 days x 50Kb = 375,000Kb or 375Mb bandwidth. Notice that the counting above only includes one webpage of your website. If you expect each visitor to visits 5 web pages of your website, you need to prepare: 375Mb x 5 web pages = 1,875Mb or 1.875 GB, which is almost 2 GB bandwidth. Also, that bandwidth counting is only from human visitors, you also need to put search engines robots into consideration. You could perhaps expect one robot to visit your page once a month or once a month or even once a day if your website is that good. That means the 1.875 GB could roughly be rounded to 2 GB while taking search engine robots into consideration.
You also need to pay attention that the example above is only assuming that you will have 250 visitors a day or 7,500 visitors a month. In general, for a website to be counted as a working website, most people will agree that 100,000 visitors a month is the minimum. With that number, you need to plan: 100,000 visitors x 50Kb x 5 pages = 25,000,000 Kb or 25 GB bandwidths each month. If your website is an advanced website with lots of graphics and flash animations to make the website more beautiful, you need 200Kb for each webpage. Thus making the bandwidth 4 times bigger or 100 GB bandwidths needed each and every month. If you are successful, you could have 500,000 visitors or more each month and that will make the number even bigger.
In summary, the bandwidth you need to run your website successfully could be foretold beforehand. Several main factors you need to take into consideration while counting bandwidth are: number of visitors each month, the total size of your pages, and how many pages you have on your website. You also need to prepare additional bandwidth for search engines robots visit and several additional bandwidths that are taken when you use database such as MySQL.
Top Web Hosting Providers In 2006 - Computer World
The Following Are The Top 10 Web Hosting Sites For The Year 2006 (All Rating are Based on Affordability, Ease of Use, and Professional Appearance)
1) Yahoo - Web Hosting: Everything you Need for a Professional SiteWeb hosting, domain names, web design, free web site and email address providers. We offer affordable hosting, dedicated ad-free hosting, ...www.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/webhosting/?p=PASSPORT
2) $3.99 Hosting at GoDaddy.com:Pay less for domain names. Register your .com, .net and .org domains. Bulk pricing and private domain name registration options.www.godaddy.com/ - 93k
3) Start Logic: StartLogic web hosting and domain name registration services. StartLogic offers affordable business website hosting with free domain names.www.startlogic.com/ - 16k
4) AN HostingWeb Hosting Services:. ... New to web hosting? Don't worry. You don't even have to know how to write computer code. We make running your own website point ...www.anhosting.com/ - 8k
5) Gate.comWeb Hosting: Web Hosting Site:Webhosting Provider Unix Hosting. 5GB Disk Space; 200GB Data Transfer; 500 Mailboxes; 100MB of MYSQL; 99.99% Uptime Guarantee. Windows Hosting ...www.ixwebhosting.com/ - 15k
6) Host Monster: 50 Gigabytes of Hosting Space. Host UNLIMITED Domains!! Unlimited Pop/Imap Email Accounts ... 2005 Hostmonster.com. All rights reserved.www.hostmonster.com/ - 16k
7) Host Can Web Hosting: Get HostICan Web Hosting for only $6.95/mo. plus Free Domain.HostICan.com
8) Host Rocket: Affordable web hosting services for business and e-commerce clients. OC-12 rated datacenter with dedicated, collocation, and application hosting ...www.hostrocket.com/ - 32k
9) Value Web: Affordable web hosting services and dedicated hosting from ValueWeb. Find the right web hosting plan to meet your business and ecommerce needs.www.valueweb.com/ - 21k
10) Dot 5 Hosting: Dot5Hosting is the leading website hosting provider, offering customers with free domain names, marketing tools and award winning technical support.www.dot5hosting.com/ - 8k
Using Free Web Hosting For Your Business... Sure, Why Not? by Lorna Timbah
Having a web site is no longer an option for your company -- it is a necessity. A web site enables your business to reach more customers at anytime and anywhere. With more than one billion people worldwide going online, your business will be missing out on a large portion of the market without a web presence.
In order to establish a web presence, one of the issues you will need to look into is getting a web hosting service for your web site. With technological progress and market competition, web hosting services are becoming more affordable, and better yet, many providers are now offering web hosting service for free. Yes, that means you don't have to spend even half a cent to get your business online.
Other than for the obvious fact that it's free, here are a few reasons why you should consider using free web hosting for your business:
- Test ground for your budding web skillsIf you are thinking of becoming your own webmaster and want to get your feet wet in web building, you probably won't be ready to invest much on web hosting yet. Free web hosting services will give you the freedom to test out your skills, to see what does or does not work in your site, and can better visualize the cost and effort needed in creating and maintaining your company web site. Free web hosting also allows you to try the hosting provider's service for an initial period; once you're confident that the service provider is reliable enough for you, you can upgrade your company web site to the service provider's paid package that is better and with more frills.
- Convenience of built-in featuresMost free web hosting companies, such as Bravenet, Yahoo!Geocities and Tripod, provide easy-to-use web page builder, and tools such as guestbook, hit counter, email forms, and others that can enhance your web site. You will be able to build your company web site in just a few simple steps, while providing you with a more than decent web site in just minutes. The extra features frees you from having to hire programmers just so that you can have online applications to capture visitor feedback, setting up of polls and survey, as well as building up your subscribers for your online newsletter.
- High return on investmentYou get free web hosting, you design your own web site, and you have fancy tools added in your site to give it extra functionality, all without having to spend a single cent. Add these up, compare with the potential new customers that you will be getting, and you find that your ROI for establishing a web presence for your company would obviously be significant. You can now reach out to your online market and hopefully your online strategy can effectively increase your revenue.
On the other hand, the downside to using free web hosting is also numerous and comes in the form of hidden costs to your business:
- Lack of flexibility and controlBe sure to read the web hosting provider's Terms of Service before registering for your free web hosting account. Some free web hosting providers restrict the use of certain file types, content, or even languages. In addition, they can also overload your web site with unneeded and irrelevant advertisements in order to support their services. When bombarded with such annoyance, visitors to your site are going to take the effort not to visit your web site ever again. You will also find that some advanced tools needed to operate a fully functional e-commerce presence are not possible with the use of free web hosting, such as shopping carts, secure ordering system and online payment gateways. You may have to upgrade or switch to a paid hosting service provider if you decide to use them, which will require not just the extra effort but also the extra cash.
- High risk of downtime and no guaranteed supportTo be honest, there is no such thing as a zero downtime, whether it be for free or paid web hosting. Downtime refers to the period of time or a percentage of a time span that a machine or system is offline or not functioning, making your web site inaccessible (source: Wikipedia). However, the risk of free web hosting having frequent downtime is more than likely to happen than with paid hosting. Free web hosting providers more often than not won't provide any guarantee to their services due to the cost of maintaining them. Other than the risk of downtime, free web hosting accounts are mostly subjected to low priority bandwidth, thus affecting access to your site by making your web site load slowly. Responses to support requests can be slow or next to nothing, and you are solely responsible for backing up your own web site files. These problems cause visitors looking for information on your company feeling frustrated. Ultimately, this can jeopardize your reputation, and your current and potential clients would view your company as an unreliable provider.
- Loss of credibilityInternet marketing strategists place unprecedented importance on the use of domain names for your business. A domain name (or web site address) is one of tools used to establish your company's online branding and image. Most free web hosting providers offer subdomains as addresses for your web site. A subdomain is a web site address whereby your business name is appended onto the free host's domain name, such as http://yourbusiness.freehost.com/ or http://www.freehost.com/yourbusiness. Seldom do you see free hosting providers that support actual domain hosting (such as http://www.yourbusiness.com), or at least not without a catch. A subdomain name as your business web address is harder for your clients to remember than a domain name. Furthermore, one serious drawback to not having your own domain name is the fact that subdomains sounds less professional. Without one, your business may be regarded as disreputable or even illegitimate, and tend to be avoided by web-savvy customers.
In the end, it's your choice. While some sacrifices needed to be done when using free web hosting, try to look at your need for web hosting service just as you would your budding business. Start small, dream big. Weight the pros and cons of free web hosting versus paid web hosting. If you have to, begin with using a free web hosting provider. Once your needs and resources grow, you can then upgrade to a more advanced web hosting service which you can afford to pay.
So don't worry for now, especially if you are a small business or are just starting one. No one will shoot you in the head for using free web hosting -- at least I won't.
In order to establish a web presence, one of the issues you will need to look into is getting a web hosting service for your web site. With technological progress and market competition, web hosting services are becoming more affordable, and better yet, many providers are now offering web hosting service for free. Yes, that means you don't have to spend even half a cent to get your business online.
Other than for the obvious fact that it's free, here are a few reasons why you should consider using free web hosting for your business:
- Test ground for your budding web skillsIf you are thinking of becoming your own webmaster and want to get your feet wet in web building, you probably won't be ready to invest much on web hosting yet. Free web hosting services will give you the freedom to test out your skills, to see what does or does not work in your site, and can better visualize the cost and effort needed in creating and maintaining your company web site. Free web hosting also allows you to try the hosting provider's service for an initial period; once you're confident that the service provider is reliable enough for you, you can upgrade your company web site to the service provider's paid package that is better and with more frills.
- Convenience of built-in featuresMost free web hosting companies, such as Bravenet, Yahoo!Geocities and Tripod, provide easy-to-use web page builder, and tools such as guestbook, hit counter, email forms, and others that can enhance your web site. You will be able to build your company web site in just a few simple steps, while providing you with a more than decent web site in just minutes. The extra features frees you from having to hire programmers just so that you can have online applications to capture visitor feedback, setting up of polls and survey, as well as building up your subscribers for your online newsletter.
- High return on investmentYou get free web hosting, you design your own web site, and you have fancy tools added in your site to give it extra functionality, all without having to spend a single cent. Add these up, compare with the potential new customers that you will be getting, and you find that your ROI for establishing a web presence for your company would obviously be significant. You can now reach out to your online market and hopefully your online strategy can effectively increase your revenue.
On the other hand, the downside to using free web hosting is also numerous and comes in the form of hidden costs to your business:
- Lack of flexibility and controlBe sure to read the web hosting provider's Terms of Service before registering for your free web hosting account. Some free web hosting providers restrict the use of certain file types, content, or even languages. In addition, they can also overload your web site with unneeded and irrelevant advertisements in order to support their services. When bombarded with such annoyance, visitors to your site are going to take the effort not to visit your web site ever again. You will also find that some advanced tools needed to operate a fully functional e-commerce presence are not possible with the use of free web hosting, such as shopping carts, secure ordering system and online payment gateways. You may have to upgrade or switch to a paid hosting service provider if you decide to use them, which will require not just the extra effort but also the extra cash.
- High risk of downtime and no guaranteed supportTo be honest, there is no such thing as a zero downtime, whether it be for free or paid web hosting. Downtime refers to the period of time or a percentage of a time span that a machine or system is offline or not functioning, making your web site inaccessible (source: Wikipedia). However, the risk of free web hosting having frequent downtime is more than likely to happen than with paid hosting. Free web hosting providers more often than not won't provide any guarantee to their services due to the cost of maintaining them. Other than the risk of downtime, free web hosting accounts are mostly subjected to low priority bandwidth, thus affecting access to your site by making your web site load slowly. Responses to support requests can be slow or next to nothing, and you are solely responsible for backing up your own web site files. These problems cause visitors looking for information on your company feeling frustrated. Ultimately, this can jeopardize your reputation, and your current and potential clients would view your company as an unreliable provider.
- Loss of credibilityInternet marketing strategists place unprecedented importance on the use of domain names for your business. A domain name (or web site address) is one of tools used to establish your company's online branding and image. Most free web hosting providers offer subdomains as addresses for your web site. A subdomain is a web site address whereby your business name is appended onto the free host's domain name, such as http://yourbusiness.freehost.com/ or http://www.freehost.com/yourbusiness. Seldom do you see free hosting providers that support actual domain hosting (such as http://www.yourbusiness.com), or at least not without a catch. A subdomain name as your business web address is harder for your clients to remember than a domain name. Furthermore, one serious drawback to not having your own domain name is the fact that subdomains sounds less professional. Without one, your business may be regarded as disreputable or even illegitimate, and tend to be avoided by web-savvy customers.
In the end, it's your choice. While some sacrifices needed to be done when using free web hosting, try to look at your need for web hosting service just as you would your budding business. Start small, dream big. Weight the pros and cons of free web hosting versus paid web hosting. If you have to, begin with using a free web hosting provider. Once your needs and resources grow, you can then upgrade to a more advanced web hosting service which you can afford to pay.
So don't worry for now, especially if you are a small business or are just starting one. No one will shoot you in the head for using free web hosting -- at least I won't.
Small Business Web Hosting Guide
Why We Need to Create a Web Site for Small Business
No need to explain more on this one, you will need to build web site for a small business to:
Build credibility: Customers expect to find you online
Makes it easy for prospects to learn about your company, contact you, or get directions to your location
Expands your reach beyond your local geographic area
Enables you to pursue a host of targeted, low-cost marketing strategies
Choose a Name for Small Business Web Site
First, you will need to think about a domain for your company site, choose something that will make sense to your business. Unless you want to spend a lot of money to advertise your web site, you will need to think about a domain name related to your product or service.
What kinds of Web Hosting You Need for Small Business Web Site
Basic Requirement of Web Hosting Plan for a Small Business Web Site
Basic requirement will discuss about the general feature of Small Business Web Hosting, such as disk space, band width, reliability, etc. Those are the basic feature you need to think about when you want to hosting a web site.
- For small company site, a shared Linux Server web hosting plan is the best choice unless you really want to use ASP or .Net to build you site, spending more time and more money. About reliability, 99.9% up time is expected. Don't let your in-stable web site hurt your business. And high access speed is also required.
- Disk space will heavily depend on what you want to put online, but normally, you will use less than 100M. You might see most of the web hosting companies provide you huge disk space like 10g, 50g. Just take it, disk space doesn't cost you too much.
- For Email account, 100 email box will be enough and most of web hosting companies will give you it if their plan target at small business market.
- Need the basic e-commerce cart support, such as: Shopping Cart, Paypal, or SSL support.
- What about the server location? Place the server close to your targeted visitor, even you are not in that country. Such as, if you want to sell something in USA, it would be better to find a web hosting company in USA, so that your visitor can access the server faster, it also a way to show your respect to your customer.
- Usually you will get a free domain in web hosting plan, and if you only want one web site, I would like suggest you to get a web hosting plan that only host one site. You won't get it for free.
- Support: We would like to have 24*7 professional courteous support with toll free phone support to make sure the issue of our site can be solved quickly. And the good news here is some top web hosting companies have get this kinds of support center setup with very low cost, and it will not cost you too much.
Advanced requirement of Web Hosting Plan for a Small Business Web Site
The advanced requirement will discuss about what additional feature you will need in a small business web hosting. And the solution for it will heavily depend on what kind of capability your company has:
- AD Credit Get some advertising credit from Google or Yahoo to promote your web site and drive the traffic to your business site, it's a good start to practice your internet marketing skill
- SEO Tools All web site will need SEO tools to promote its site, you might hope web hosting company can provide them unless you are skilled in it and want to do it by yourself or you want to get some other company to provide this service (That means big money need to pay out)
No need to explain more on this one, you will need to build web site for a small business to:
Build credibility: Customers expect to find you online
Makes it easy for prospects to learn about your company, contact you, or get directions to your location
Expands your reach beyond your local geographic area
Enables you to pursue a host of targeted, low-cost marketing strategies
Choose a Name for Small Business Web Site
First, you will need to think about a domain for your company site, choose something that will make sense to your business. Unless you want to spend a lot of money to advertise your web site, you will need to think about a domain name related to your product or service.
What kinds of Web Hosting You Need for Small Business Web Site
Basic Requirement of Web Hosting Plan for a Small Business Web Site
Basic requirement will discuss about the general feature of Small Business Web Hosting, such as disk space, band width, reliability, etc. Those are the basic feature you need to think about when you want to hosting a web site.
- For small company site, a shared Linux Server web hosting plan is the best choice unless you really want to use ASP or .Net to build you site, spending more time and more money. About reliability, 99.9% up time is expected. Don't let your in-stable web site hurt your business. And high access speed is also required.
- Disk space will heavily depend on what you want to put online, but normally, you will use less than 100M. You might see most of the web hosting companies provide you huge disk space like 10g, 50g. Just take it, disk space doesn't cost you too much.
- For Email account, 100 email box will be enough and most of web hosting companies will give you it if their plan target at small business market.
- Need the basic e-commerce cart support, such as: Shopping Cart, Paypal, or SSL support.
- What about the server location? Place the server close to your targeted visitor, even you are not in that country. Such as, if you want to sell something in USA, it would be better to find a web hosting company in USA, so that your visitor can access the server faster, it also a way to show your respect to your customer.
- Usually you will get a free domain in web hosting plan, and if you only want one web site, I would like suggest you to get a web hosting plan that only host one site. You won't get it for free.
- Support: We would like to have 24*7 professional courteous support with toll free phone support to make sure the issue of our site can be solved quickly. And the good news here is some top web hosting companies have get this kinds of support center setup with very low cost, and it will not cost you too much.
Advanced requirement of Web Hosting Plan for a Small Business Web Site
The advanced requirement will discuss about what additional feature you will need in a small business web hosting. And the solution for it will heavily depend on what kind of capability your company has:
- AD Credit Get some advertising credit from Google or Yahoo to promote your web site and drive the traffic to your business site, it's a good start to practice your internet marketing skill
- SEO Tools All web site will need SEO tools to promote its site, you might hope web hosting company can provide them unless you are skilled in it and want to do it by yourself or you want to get some other company to provide this service (That means big money need to pay out)
Monday, February 26, 2007
Choosing the Ideal Web Site Host
Pure and simple. The success of your website depends on how much traffic you can generate to it. Your website search engine rank dictates your success or failure. Get on the first search engine results page for your keywords and your probability of success will be high. If you land anywhere else in the search engine results, you are invisible and will probably fail. If you are not experienced in search engine optimization and you do not know all the steps that it takes to make your site rank high with the search engines, you need a web site host that will guide you through the steps and provides the necessary assistance to make your site appear on the first page of the search engines. The ideal web site host should offer the following services:
1. Fast, reliable hosting 2. Reasonable cost for services provided 3. No initial set up fee 4. Domain registration included in hosting charge 5. Unlimited data transfer 6. Email customer support 7. Telephone customer support 8. Point and click page building 9. Unlimited web pages 10. Tools for brainstorming key words for your site theme 11. Tools for evaluating the supply and demand for your keywords 12. Assistance in building your web pages to make them search engine friendly 13. Uploading your own web pages if desired 14. Automatic submission of each new page or each updated page to the search engines 15. Page templates for your site 16. Customized 404 error pages 17. Direction on creating Google and Yahoo site maps. 18. Inclusion of a blog site 19. Unlimited email accounts 20. Email forwarding 21. Email domain forwarding 22. Support forum of other users 23. Point and click custom input form creation tool 24. Unlimited autoresponders 25. Ability to upload XML code for RSS pages 26. Link exchange and link builder 27. eZine publishing tool 28. Email marketing list builder/distribution 29. Reports
a. Search engine ranking report b. Traffic statistics and analysis c. Click tracking and analysis d. Keyword search report for search engines e. Tracking of search engine spiders 30. Any other additional services
If you find a web host that provides all these services, you should hire it immediately. For more information about choosing web site hosts, read the Boomer eZine at http://www.boomer-ezine.com/about_iwh.htm. To succeed on the Internet, you need all the help you can get. Make certain that your web site host can give you that help and that all the services are included in the base price.
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1. Fast, reliable hosting 2. Reasonable cost for services provided 3. No initial set up fee 4. Domain registration included in hosting charge 5. Unlimited data transfer 6. Email customer support 7. Telephone customer support 8. Point and click page building 9. Unlimited web pages 10. Tools for brainstorming key words for your site theme 11. Tools for evaluating the supply and demand for your keywords 12. Assistance in building your web pages to make them search engine friendly 13. Uploading your own web pages if desired 14. Automatic submission of each new page or each updated page to the search engines 15. Page templates for your site 16. Customized 404 error pages 17. Direction on creating Google and Yahoo site maps. 18. Inclusion of a blog site 19. Unlimited email accounts 20. Email forwarding 21. Email domain forwarding 22. Support forum of other users 23. Point and click custom input form creation tool 24. Unlimited autoresponders 25. Ability to upload XML code for RSS pages 26. Link exchange and link builder 27. eZine publishing tool 28. Email marketing list builder/distribution 29. Reports
a. Search engine ranking report b. Traffic statistics and analysis c. Click tracking and analysis d. Keyword search report for search engines e. Tracking of search engine spiders 30. Any other additional services
If you find a web host that provides all these services, you should hire it immediately. For more information about choosing web site hosts, read the Boomer eZine at http://www.boomer-ezine.com/about_iwh.htm. To succeed on the Internet, you need all the help you can get. Make certain that your web site host can give you that help and that all the services are included in the base price.
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