Selecting a Small Business web hosting company can be a confusing process, simply because there are so many options available to you. Not all web hosting services offer the same features, nor are all the pricing plans the same.
Also, be sure you understand the current and possible future needs of your business for small business hosting. You will want to be able to add additional websites to your business web hosting account without extra charges.
Most importantly, before buying call the small business web hosting company’s tech support line to see how easy it is to get throught to them. If your site goes down – you will need access to them ASAP!
Here are nine factors you should consider when picking the Ideal Small Business Web Hosting
- Make sure the web host supports the programming languages that you or your web designer are comfortable with. For example, if you plan on using cascading style sheets (CSS), make sure your host has the capabilities to support those. If you want to collect customer data or payment information using online forms, make sure the web hosting service provides support for SQL programming. The web host could offer you every other feature in the book, but if you can’t put up your site on their servers, it won’t do you much good. Consult with the person or company who will be designing your site before you purchase hosting services to ensure that everything you want your site to do is possible with that host.
- Make sure the host provides you with the right amount of disk space on their servers. The more features your website offers, the larger the file size of your pages will be. Pay attention to the dollar cost per megabyte of storage space the hosting service offers. Many hosting services now offer infinite storage space in exchange for a lump sum fee or a long-term subscription to their service, which can definitely be something to consider if you have a website with a large number of pages or large file sizes per page.
- If your pages are relatively small, however, you may not need to pay extra for the additional disk space. Again, consult with your web designer to make sure that the hosting service you’re considering meets your needs. Also consider that many hosting services will not allow you to store files that are not actively being used by your website; don’t plan on using your web hosting space to store other business files.
- Determine if your website is going to require databases, how many databases you need, and the type of databases you require. This is, again, a highly technical question that is best posed to your web designer when hashing out the details of your site design. If you purchase a hosting package that doesn’t offer enough or the right kind of databases, you may not be able to build the site you want. Be sure database support is clearly spelled out in your service contract before you give a hosting company any of your money. Getting stuck without enough database space can be a death knell for a business that needs to store lots of customer information.
- Make sure to do your own investigation about the security of the hosting company’s servers. The hosting company will of course assure you that their servers are completely safe, but depending on the reputability of the company, this may not be the case. Check out news stories about infiltrations that involve that hosting company, if you can find any. Also check out reviews from other customers discussing potential exposures of their data. If you will be selling a product through your website, server security is especially important, as you will be collecting and transmitting customer billing data. Having that data exposed to a hacker is a quick way to ruin the reputation of your business and put a significant dent in your customer base. Don’t let it happen!
- Make sure the hosting service offers your site enough bandwidth. Bandwidth is the amount of data that is transferred between the hosting company’s servers and the user’s computer. If you expect to see a large number of users, expect users to be transmitting large amounts of data through your site (especially if they will be uploading or downloading video files.) If that’s the case, you will need a high amount of bandwidth per month. Nothing is worse for a company than having their site rendered inaccessible because it ran out of bandwidth. This is one area of your hosting package where you really cannot over-buy. The amount of traffic a given website will attract can be very difficult to predict, especially if you’re using link-baiting techniques to drive traffic.
- Consider whether you need the hosting company to back up your data, or if you can do it on your own local servers. Many hosting companies will offer data back up services, but of course these come at a cost. If you can keep current back ups of customer data and your website files on your local servers, you may not need to pay extra for the back up services. However, remember that if something were to happen to your local data, you would not be able to restore your site. If you choose to back up your data yourself, keep it in multiple physical locations on more than one server.
- Determine your e-mail needs. Many hosting companies will offer you a number of e-mail addresses in the @yourdomain.com format. These are much more professional looking to customers and other businesses than if you get your e-mail services through a consumer-level provider, such as your ISP or a webmail service. However, consider how many separate addresses you actually require. If your company only has a few employees, or is just you, you probably don’t need 30 separate e-mail addresses along with your hosting service. If these addresses are priced separately from the rest of the hosting package, consider what you really need and save money.
- Make sure the servers have a high proportion of “uptime”. This is the percentage of the time that the servers are accessible to users through the Internet. You want at least 98% uptime. It’s not very good for business if potential customers try to access your web site and can’t because the servers are down once a week. Having servers with large amounts of downtime can also hurt your search engine rankings, because if the search engine keeps hitting your site and getting an error, it might assume your site has been removed.
Your Business Mentor Ray currently uses both HostGator.com and HostMonster.com. The web site you are reading from is hosted on HostGator.com. Remember that when you buy your domain name you do not have to host it with the same company that you are buying from, or from where you got it previously. It is easy to move the domain name to a different one of the small business hosting sites.
Choosing the right web hosting service is an important decision for any business that plans to sell or market products online. Make sure that the host you choose offers the features you need without too many extras you don’t want to pay for. The factors in this article should help you in figuring out which Small Business Web Hosting is right for you.
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