Good research is required to find a good business web hosting that is reputable and reliable. You should ask your business associates for their recommendations. There are Internet sites that provide reviews of web hosting companies. Before choosing a web hosting take the time to get the most relevant and accurate information about web hosting. Your website should provide useful information and invite visitors to return to the site. You can use your website for sales, marketing, or promotions that are critical to the success of your business.
Basic Requirements for a Web Hosting
First, decide what services you need. If necessary, consult a computer expert about disk space to determine how much disk space your Web site will require. If you plan to sell online, you’ll need a shopping cart, and you may need a merchant account so you can accept credit card payments. Most web hosting charge a fee to reserve your domain name, and there will be an initial setup fee and monthly fee, usually for less than $100 per month. They charge a fee to update the site, and they will charge a fee to maintain your site.
Mailing List Program
You want web hosting that offers a mailing list program that creates and maintains a database. You can use the database to create a mailing list that allows you to easily distribute newsletters, survey customers, announce the company or distribute training materials. This program is a valuable marketing and income-generating part of your online activity. This program must include a federally required “opt-out” or “unsubscribe” feature.
Statistical Visitor Data
Be sure to choose a web hosting that provides you with feedback on visitors to your site. You need a count of visitors and the dates and times of their visits. You also want the web hosting to give you reports such as charts, graphs, or other formats that explain the activity on your website. Research each potential web hosting and compare their services and costs.
Autoresponder
Your web hosting should offer you an email program that automatically responds to email messages from visitors you receive. This program automatically sends form letters in response to any message. This program also automatically enters visitors’ information into your database and makes it part of the mailing list program.
E-commerce
If you’re selling online, you don’t want mistakes or problems that upset your customers and limit your sales. E-commerce web hosting must provide a high level of security and encrypt credit card numbers and other personal information. Your web hosting may be able to provide you with e-commerce software at a low cost. Some web hosting will give you regular reports on the number of visitors to your site.
Security
If you sell online, you want your web hosting to provide security measures so that you can accept payments online securely. A protocol is needed to encrypt data transfers, account numbers, etc. Ask potential web hosting if they offer SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) security to protect data transfer and verify identity so that your customers’ personal information is protected.
Anonymous FTP
Most commercial web hosting plans offer File Transfer Protocol (FTP), and it gives visitors the ability to download files from your site. If you want your visitors to be able to access free downloads without a password or other identification, you want Anonymous FTP. It makes your site and its features easy for your visitors to use while maximizing the “user-friendly” capabilities of your site.
Hosting Your Own Website
There are several requirements if you are planning to host your own website, and you must ensure that it is cost-effective. Hosting your own site can cost thousands of dollars that you can use to build a bigger, better website because hosting your own site is expensive. In order to host your site, your Internet service provider must set up your hosting, and you will need the right hardware and software.
You will need to pay someone to serve as your webmaster and maintain your site, and that person must have the technical skills to make your site efficiently run off your hardware. They also require some programming skills and will be expensive. You must have a dedicated high-speed Internet connection that will cost at least $200 per month. If you need a high-speed T1 line, the cost is thousands of dollars a month.
You must have authorized IP (Internet Protocol) addresses issued by your Internet service provider to give your Web site specific Internet addresses, and you must purchase a domain name and reserve it for about $15 per year. The necessary web server software can be purchased from a number of vendors, including Microsoft and Netscape, and costs between $500 and $2,000. You should also have a good computer that can run your server with high memory, a good processor, a large memory capacity, and a large hard disk. The computer will cost at least $2,000, and you’ll need additional hardware and software.
Your business web hosting plan is one of the key components of your business plan. Make a list of your business needs. Ignore that your hosting company may provide the features you need to conduct your planned activities. Your web hosting plan should provide the specific features you need to help your business grow.
Web Hosting Providers
Web hosting service comes under the category of Internet hosting service and is the most important aspect of your web presence. Web hosting providers allow users to stock information, imagery, videos, or other things available through the World Wide Web. Web hosting service companies help their customers by providing them space on the servers they own. In a data center, the web hosting provider also gives its customers access to the Internet. Web hosting providers also help with collaboration where the Internet connection and data center space is allocated to the servers, not owned by them. There are many web hosting providers for running web servers.
There are web hosting providers whose services are limited to the web. Free web hosting providers provide web hosting service for free or sometimes it is fully supported by advertisement. If you compare this service with a paid hosting service, it is very constraining. Clustered web hosting providers boast of multiple servers that host the same content. Thus, the provision for exploitation of resources increases. Then there are shared web hosting providers whose websites share the same server with many other sites. These sites range from a few to more than a few thousand.
The duty of colocation web hosting providers is almost the same as that of dedicated web hosting providers. Dedicated hosting service providers help the user to get their own web server. The user receives a total command on the web server. But, colocation web hosting providers facilitate the process of owning the server to the user. The server grabs the physical space provided by the web hosting company. The company also takes care of the servers. The most powerful and expensive web hosting service is provided by Colocation Web Hosting Service. Most often, the client’s machine becomes equipped with electrical equipment, Internet access, and storage space for the server.
Customers themselves become web hosts in a reseller web hosting service. Hosted resellers and resellers for different domains can operate under any mishmash of programmed categories. An affiliation with a web hosting provider is key here. Virtual web hosting providers split a server into virtual servers. However, in this case, users may think that they are being provided with a dedicated web hosting service, but, in practice, they are allotted a server.
How to Manage Multiple Websites By Web Hosting Strategy
If you are making a comfortable living from the internet and the web or plan to achieve that goal, then it is possible that you are running more than ten websites. Websites are your virtual offices. You want your site to be up and running 365 days a week, 24 hours a day. If running a website is a hobby then managing multiple websites is a daunting task.
Proposed Hosting Strategy for Managing Multiple Websites
The hosting strategy we propose is to host several of your major websites with 3-4 different hosting companies, 1) another hosting for smaller and newer websites, 2) web development, and 3) backup Opening a reseller account with the company. Hosting with multiple hosting companies will significantly increase the time and difficulty of managing sites, and using a single hosting company is also not a smart choice.
Justification of the Hosting Strategy
Cost – The cost of web hosting is not a problem to run a single website whether it costs $5 or $25 per month. The difference is only a few hundred dollars or less a year. It is always good and smart to make the most of every single dollar of trading. At least, a difference of a few hundred dollars can neither make nor break a business. If you run 10 or 50 websites, the cost of web hosting alone will define the success or failure of your online adventure. To cut down on hosting costs, the alternative is to host as many small or new sites as you want for around $15 a month using a reseller hosting account. You host one or 2 major websites with a hosting company. Shared hosting accounts cost less than $10 per month, and dedicated servers will cost $50 or more per month.
Uptime – If your bread-and-butter maker website is down for a few hours, you will lose hundreds of dollars and more. Even though most hosting companies promise 99.9% uptime, it is not common to see a website down for a few hours. If a hosting company is doing a major update, the site may be down for half a day or so. The hosting company may update over the weekend or during a major holiday, but that’s when many family-oriented and travel sites generate their revenue. If you can afford the loss of revenue, many website owners cannot bear the psychological loss and pressure. Hosting your sites with a few hosting companies will reduce the risk of downtime.
Application Development – For a simple web application, the webmaster will develop it on the same production hosting site. If your eCommerce applications are complex, developing on a production site may bring the live site down, especially if you are in the process of changing configuration files or installing customized applications. The alternative is to set up a website on your reseller account for development and testing, and after completion move the applications to the production account on another server.
Backup – If you are not happy with one hosting company, one hosting company is out of business, or the server will be down for a day or two, you can easily switch from one hosting company to another, either temporarily or permanently Because you are already familiar with site management tools. If you have a backup or secondary copy running on another server, all you need to do is transfer the domain to the switch, which will take no more than a minute.
Shop Before You Buy
There are tons of hosting plans to choose from with a huge number of hosting companies – ASP Web Hosting, Budget Hosting, Dedicated Servers, eCommerce Hosting, Frontpage Web Hosting, Hosting with Templates, Managed Web Hosting, PHP Web Hosting, Reseller Hosting, Shared Hosting, Unix/Linux Hosting, Virtual Private Server, Windows Hosting or Co-location Hosting. Compare the cost, hosting features, and tracking records of hosting companies before making your commitment. Good luck with your online adventures.