If you are in the market for a web hosting service for your small business there are some options to keep in mind.

Email: Not all affordable web hosts will offer email. You need to make sure that you have a complete email setup with your hosting plan. Check to see if your host offers auto responders, POP3 and email forwarding. If they do this should be enough to run your small business email needs.

Secure Servers: If you plan on use a shopping cart to sell items this is a must have. Referred to as SSL, this option allows for secure payments between your site and the customer. If you are selling and have a shopping cart then make sure your small business host offers SSL.

Control Panel: A good control panel is easy to navigate, understand and actually comes in useful. A bad control panel can be a living nightmare. If you host uses cPanel as your main admin control panel you are in good hands. If the host runs their own version of a homegrown control panel be wary. Lake of controls can really keep you from running your site efficiently.

Windows or Linux: Do you know if your site needs to run on a MS Windows server with FrontPage extensions or does it need PERL, PHP or MySQL? These things you will need to find out if you intent to run a successful small business web site.

Affordable web hosting for small business is a very real possibility. It can be done at a very good price and if you go into it with the information you need you’ll come out with a very good solution.

 



Show My Shots

While looking for free web hosting for your small business you need to keep the following things in mind.

Advertising: Just about all free web hosts will impose advertising on your site. The host does this to recover the costs of running the hardware and providing the bandwidth for your site.

Web Space: Most free small business web hosting has very limited space. You will be lucky if you find a free host that offers more than 20MB of disk space. This isn’t such a bad thing as most sites are under 5MB in size. A 5MB site can be up to 200 pages of html code but beware, if you site contains heavy graphics, music or video this limited free space will run out very quickly.

FTP: Some small business web hosts do not provide FTP access. FTP stands for File Transmission Protocol and allows you to transfer large files via a server. This isn’t a big deal if you don’t do a lot of file transfers but if you plan on sending and receiving lots of images or video files this is something you need to be aware of.

Stability and Reliability: This is an important factor to look at. Unless you don’t mind you site going down or off-line all the time you need to find out what the free small business web host provider “down time” is. If it is anything more than 99% I do not recommend using this provider.

Bandwidth: To have enough bandwidth to run a small business website you need about 1-3GB of monthly bandwidth. Anything less than 1GB and the most you will be running on it will be a personal webpage or one for the local church.

 



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