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Showing posts with label Small Business Web Hosting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Small Business Web Hosting. Show all posts

Thursday, March 05, 2009

Small Business Web Hosting Reviews

As a small business owner, you have too much to worry about. The last thing you need is to concern yourself with evaluating the 1000's of small business web hosting reviews available. That's why I've written this article to highlight some of the better hosting companies from our small business web hosting reviews web site and to help you quickly evaluate them on your own.

Website Wizard and Website Templates

If you don't have the experience to create your own website from scratch, don't worry. Some of the best web hosting companies have great wizards and tools available that allow you to choose a website template and then drag and drop your businesses' information into place. These WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) tools can save a small business owner like you days in frustrating web design.

If a website wizard is a priority for you find a provider that provides plenty of pre-built website templates (at least 500) and an easy editor. The best small business hosting company that provides this is Host Gator. You can even try their tool before you commit to their services. Try it out and make sure it will work for you.

Free Domain Names

If you're starting a website for your small business, you need a great domain name. Domain names can cost between seven and twelve dollars a year. The top small business web hosting companies pay this fee for you so as long as you remain their customer. In fact, some of these companies provide you with two (you should always have your website registered 2 times under .com and .net).

For this reason (and others), my small business web hosting review website recommends IX hosting as the top available company. Not only do they provide you with 2 free domain names, but they give you 8 free static IP addresses.

Marketing Support and PPC Credit

If you're reading about small business web hosting reviews, it means you're looking for another way to promote your business. The top web hosting companies not only offer you domain names for free but they also provide your business credit toward the top PPC (pay per click) and other various online marketing programs.

Don't overlook this. If you're paying $12 a month for your site and are getting over $250 in advertising expenses paid for, it can pay for the cost of your website many times over! If marketing credits are important to you, our small business web hosting review site suggests IX hosting or Midphase hosting.

Database Support

Many small businesses overlook the importance of robust database capabilities in their small business web hosting providers. This can be a major mistake. Even if you don't plan on programming any database functionality into your website, many built in forms and email applications utilize these databases to function properly.

If you plan in doing any sort of lead capture and follow up system on your website (and you should) make sure your small business hosting provider provides either MySQL or standard SQL. All of the companies on our small business web hosting review website support all of the major databases.

There are many factors to consider when choosing a small business web hosting provider. This article has highlighted some of our top choices from our small business web hosting reviews, but we have also created a website that evaluates the pros and cons of various top small business web hosting companies (see the about me / resource box for the link). I invite you to use that site as you evaluate your next steps. Choosing a site to host your small business website is a big decision. Make the right one.

Good luck!

About the Author

As a website developer and consultant, Brian Anthony has extensively evaluated the majority of web hosting alternatives for small businesses. He provides in-depth reviews for small business web hosting here.

Friday, May 09, 2008

Comparing Small Business Web Hosting To Find The Best One

Comparing web hosting small business plans can be time consuming, however, a crucial step in your future success with your business online. Making the right decision is not simply an act of getting the best price webhosting.

Web hosting for small business is different then picking hosting packages for personal websites. There is so much to consider. Web hosting for small business has unique needs, and also features which many free hosting or when comparison webhosting small business you might not find.

For example when doing a comparison web hosting small business, you might not realize that some small business web hosting companies only allow hosting off of the hosting companies domain. In effect you might only be able to host your small business on a sub domain.

A domain is this: www.exampledomain.com

A sub domain is this: www.subd.exampledomain.com

As you can see, this is not a good way to go, if you want to look professional. There are workarounds such as buying your domain elsewhere and simply pointing or forwarding the domain to that sub domain. But, this is not as flexible as we want it. So our comparison web hosting small business search continues.

Another point to consider is that of how you can manage your small business website and domain. This is a big consideration, as you may want to the flexibility to change certain things. Such as creating email addresses and adding sub domains.

When doing comparison webhosting small business, you may find that your small business website hosting company has a proprietary system which could be a problem when moving as you might have to learn the new web hosting companies control panel system and how things are done. Again another point to consider when doing comparison web hosting small business.

One way I have found and I feel is the greatest. A lot of the smaller web hosting companies and now larger web hosting small business companies are offering a control panel called funnily enough cPanel! This interface is becoming a huge favourite. It gives you an easy to use interface that you can get used to in 5 minutes and also when you move host, you will be presented with cPanel again. So no need for learning a new system again. When doing comparison website hosting small business, you will find those details as well.

The control panel becomes very useful when you have a new staff member and want to create an email account for them. A small business website hosting company might need you to contact them to create email addresses. When doing a comparison web hosting small business, you very likely will not have this problem. However, it generally happens if you have had someone or a company do your web designing.

Before leaving this article and you can do a comparison web hosting small business to find a website hosting company for your needs, consider also email. Email is an important part of having an online presence. Make sure when doing a comparison web hosting small business that you can have as many emails as you want to.

Many companies try limiting the amount of email addresses you can create. This may not seem like a problem at first; however, if you wanted to set up auto responders who would notify people of several different products, you could find yourself in needing a solution and fast. Also consider when doing comparison web hosting small business of how you can access email. POP email options as well as web mail options are great for in office and out of office access of emails.

About the Author

Here is a list of business website hosting links that may help you:
* Real Estate Website Hosting
* Comparison Web Hosting Small Business
* Article Submission

Article Source: Content for Reprint

Saturday, November 24, 2007

Choosing a Small Business Web Hosting Provider

If you are looking to have a web presence for your small business you will need a web hosting provider to host your website. It does not make any difference whether you are an individual who wants to share their hobby with the world, or a large company requiring e-commerce applications to sell your goods online, either way you will need a web hosting provider to make your site available on the Internet.

Currently there are many thousands of web hosting providers out there all fighting for your business, this alone can make choosing a web hosting provider a confusing task. Below are a few aspects to consider that will hopefully relieve some of the confusion involved with choosing a web hosting provider.

The first aspect that you must determine is the type of website or websites you are planning to make available on the Internet. This will greatly influence your choice in web hosts, if you are going to have a website of less hundred pages and will not be hosting any multimedia content such as streaming videos, a standard entry level hosting plan will more than likely provide more than you will ever need. Entry level plans can be found for less than $5 per month, there are many companies covering this segment of the web hosting market.

A good option to consider for small business is shared web hosting, this type of web hosting is very affordable and can be found for less than $10 per month, most if not all shared web hosting providers these days offer good feature sets, as well as a generous amount of disk space and bandwidth. Features such as PHP and MySQL databases are the standard features offered by shared hosting providers running on Linux powered servers. The main thing to remember is not to sacrifice quality just to save a few dollars per month. Be sure to read reviews, check the hosting providers message boards if they have one for user feedback about a prospective host and arm yourself with as much information about a hosting provider before making your final decision.

Other considerations that need to be taken into account are bandwidth and disk space. Bandwidth is the amount of data transferred from your site, although it is almost impossible to calculate the amount of bandwidth your site will require you can make an educated guess by working out the average size of your websites pages, and then multiplying this size by the amount of page views you expect to see in a month.

It is crucial that you allow for more bandwidth than what your site will require, if at any point your site requires more bandwidth than your plan allows you run the risk of having your site shutdown by your web hosting provider to conserve bandwidth. Working out disk space usage is easier, this involves adding up the size of each page you will be uploading to your hosting space, if you will be using databases be sure to allow for this usage in your calculations.

In summary, find out as much information about a web hosting provider you are considering as possible, find out their good aspects, as well as their bad aspects, be sure to allow more bandwidth than your site will require, and more disk space than your site will require, also allow for any growth in the future, either by allowing for growth when choosing your plan initially, or choosing a provider that allows you to upgrade your web hosting plan easily.


About the Author: David J. Smith owner and operator of Webhost Advisor has recently written a Bluehost review and they have been found to be a reliable web hosting provider which you should put on your short list when choosing your web host.