Business Hosting : Building Your Online Business

By Irma Lampton


A great majority of businesses nowadays require the use of a website to keep abreast with competitors and to expand their market share. Business hosting for your company website will provide a wide array of tools and services at your disposal to stay competitive in the online landscape. If your website is unresponsive or unreliable, then potential clients will simply go somewhere else. This brings to the fore the importance of having a good and reliable business host.

Your choice of a business hosting company is crucial and may hold the key to a more successful business venture. You have to consider a multitude of factors before finally committing yourself to the services of a business hosting company.

Bandwidth and disk space are particularly crucial so you have to know how much your webhost can provide. The disk space is the amount of storage that your hosting plan comes with. This typically includes space allotted for databases and emails. In general, it is advisable to have ample room for expansion as your business grows and to deviate from the traditional web design. Bandwidth is also called data transfer/month, it is linked to the volume of traffic that your website gets, the busier your website, the more bandwidth you need. In most cases, servers offer unlimited bandwidth to entice clients to sign up for their service. However, in as much as unlimited bandwidth sounds appealing, it has a major drawback. It is possible for your website to crash when someone else on the same server and the same policy suddenly gets cudgeled with traffic.

Another factor that you need to consider when choosing the right webhosting for your business is your options when it comes to tools. There are plenty that will be offered to you, such as SSL certificates, shopping carts, unlimited databases, mailing list software and even marketing tools. Such tools have become the standards for good webhosting service. Just keep in mind that these tools ought to be compatible with those that you have been using in order to get the value for your money.

The third factor that you should look into is the kind of technical support you can get from your webhost. Take a good look at the type of backup features they recommend. In case of technical problems, you need to make sure that your webhost can always be relied upon and readily available whenever you need them. The hosting services should have adequate links to the internet or be linked by a series of backbone providers. Whatever service you decide to avail should offer an uptime warranty and a money back guarantee. Backups and customer support should always be available 24 hours a day.

In the event that you have decided to go for the services of a particular business hosting company, you still have two basic options to consider.

Do you want your business hosting company to do it all from designing your website to maintaining it, or you want to build it from the ground-up by yourself? If you opt for the former, you still have the responsibility for uploading your website onto the server from your computer. However, your business hosting company will guide you in this aspect and provide you with the essentials in maintaining your website. You would most likely be offered a domain name and an e-mail program specifically designed to give you a professional edge. On the other hand, if you go for the latter, you may need the services of a website designer before choosing your business hosting company. By having your website design first, you will be able to identify your needs from your business hosting plan.

There is no scarcity of business hosting companies out there to get your website up and running on the internet. Selecting a good business hosting company goes beyond mere comparison shopping for the lowest possible rate. You need to take time, examine your options and think things through before picking a web hosting company for your business website, and you will see that you will be much better off over the long-run.




About the Author: