If and when you’re interested in starting an online business, there
are a lot of things that you have to study first before you can
rightfully expect a high return on investment.
First, make sure that your company website has a user friendly interface
which basically means links are visible, easily located and properly
labeled and that the content provided in the website is complete,
interesting, effective and grammatically correct.
There’s the matter of search engine optimization or SEO which requires
you to employ a number of strategies that your company website is heard
and seen by the right people. Common search engine optimization
strategies would be keyword listing, site code optimization and top
search engine placement.
Optimize your plan by understanding web hosting. No matter how great
your website looks or how effective your SEO strategies are, if you
don’t have the right web hosting plan, none of those would see the light
of the day because your web hosting plan simply prevents them from being
properly uploaded and viewed.
Web hosting is important to your plans if you want your website to have
its own niche in the Internet so do read carefully what we’re about to
teach you.
You have a couple of choices when it comes to web hosting - you can get
it for free or you can spend for it. Naturally, it would be lovely if
web hosting would be free for all of us but understand that all the
needs of your company website must be met by the free web hosting plan
if you want your future to look rosy.
These are key issues to address.
Are you willing to deal with advertisements that may take too much space
or would have an irritable effect on your readers? These ads are often
required by free web hosting plans because it’s the only reason they can
continue letting people enjoy free web hosting.
Are you “cool” with low bandwidth access and minimal web space?
If you’re not okay with the following facts I presented, then I suggest
you go with a web consultant and let them handle all of your work.
What is Web
Hosting
A web hosting service provides a service that allows individuals and
businesses to post web pages to the internet. A web hosting service
provider sells or for free (with advertisements on the web page) is a
business that provides the servers and technologies to view web-sites on
the internet.
Web hosting services are services that customers can utilize after they
have purchased monthly dial up or broadband services that allow them
access to the internet. Web hosting services use hosting and client
architecture to load content to the server so web pages and information
can be viewed on the internet in its original HTML format.
A web hosting company will offer clients access to a server that will
provide the clients’ content to individuals on the World Wide Web after
they make a URL or domain name request. To view pages on the web, you
must have a web browser, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape
Navigator to request the web page from the server after you have
purchased internet access.
Web sites are pages that are stored on a computer called a server. The
server is a part of a network of computers on the internet or World Wide
Web that allows users of the internet to reach your site anywhere in the
world at anytime. The internet is open 24 hours, seven days a week
around the clock.
Host computers are configured so that when your URL or domain name is
typed in, the address will use a pointer routine (look for the address
from terminal to terminal) until it reaches the computer that hosts your
web-site. Then, if all is okay, your web site should display itself on
the users screen.
Hosting companies require that you buy your URL or domain name first
before you purchase hosting services. Most hosting companies have a
package that will allow you to buy the domain name and hosting at the
same time.
Here is The Top Ten Web Hosting
Companies
With hundreds of web hosting companies offering all kinds of hosting
plans, it has become challenging to find balance between
price, features, performance
and support. On this page you will find a selection
of well rounded hosts we recommend for hosting b2evolution as well
as any other web site including blogs, forums, galleries, CMS pages
as well as e-commerce/shopping carts. See our recommendations & more
info below:
Top 10 recommended web
hosts - March 2010
#1InMotion - Award
winning tech support and 99.9%
uptime. Uses Speed
Zone technology, keeping your website and email fast. All business
class hosting plans come with an industry leading 90-Day
Money-Back-Guarantee. Features Live Chat!
#2Just Host
- Reliable web hosting at $3.45 a month! Unlimited:GBs
of space and Transfer, domains, e-mail accounts, MySQL databases.
Free: Site builder,
url for life,
instant setup. Comes with anytime money-back-guarantee.
#3Host Monster -
Professionals can buy unlimited domains on one account. Free set up,
no hidden fees. Now serving over 600,000 domains! Contracts can be
cancelled at anytime with zero processing fees.
#4
FatCow - Winner of the 10
Best Hosts Award. Offers: 50% off, no hidden fees,
instant set-up. Unlimited disk space and
bandwidth. Free
domain! $50 Google Adwords credit! FatCow is powered by 100% wind
energy.
#5Host Gator - Best
dedicated web
servers: 99.9% uptime 45 day Money-Back-Guarantee. No contracts or
hidden fees. Now hosting over 2.5 million domains! Meets all
BBBOnLine membership
standards!
#6Go Daddy
- Offers Bulk Domain Registration, to save money! $4.24 a
month web hosting when you commit to three years. No setup fee, zero
ad pop-ups, and does not require annual
commitment! Voted
"Best Registrar" in 2006 to '09 Domain Name Wire annual surveys.
#7
Arvixe - Freedom of the
web at your fingertips. Offers free domain ownership for life with
the purchase of any hosting plan. Also offers blog, shopping cart,
forum, CMS, video sharing software and social network hosting. 24/7
live chat or by phone.
#8
iPowerWeb - 1500 GBs of
space, 15,000 GBs of bandwidth, and Free set up. Offers a $50 free
credit towards Google AdWords. Provides
quality, affordable products. Now hosting over 700,000 websites from
over 100 countries!
Hacker safe!
#9Aplus.net - You
can choose a suitable web
hosting package and easily manage your site. Offers quality and
reliable service that delivers. Features Unix and Windows Server
technology on a new hybrid platform. Comes with 30-day
money-back-guarantee.
#10
iPage - Affordable and
easy to use services. Offers unlimited domains and bandwidth.
Free: Set-up and instant activation, site-building
and SEO tools. Over
1,000,000 websites served! iPage gets it's electrical power from
wind energy.
What
Plans to Chose while purchasing the Dedicated hosting Managed or
Unmanaged
Using Managed Dedicated Web Hosting
Managed dedicated web hosting is for an individual or company that
wants storage and bandwidth without the restrictions that you get by
choosing a free web hosting service. If you have a site which
you want to have more bells and whistles programmed into it, then
managed dedicated hosting is the way to go.
Dedicated services give you more email addresses, sometimes up to
500 addresses. It also has storage to support basic database
applications on the server side of the web host. This allows for the
development of applications that enable you to store data on the
server side also and have queries and other types of program and
programming scripts embedded into your web-site.
But the key to these kinds of servers are the bandwidth that’s
available to the user. Monthly bandwidth can range from 500 to
1000GB for the user.
That’s good for your basic SOHO business or home office because if
you’re running a small audio or flash application or database on
your site, this type of hosting service should do just fine. Also,
you can assign the other email accounts to co-workers, family
members or whoever you want to.
When you are running web applications over 1,000GB, that’s when you
should consider steeping up your web hosting package. There are
various types of web plans based on the types of internet
applications that you are developing for your business. For example,
if you are developing online streaming video content for your site,
then you might want to go past the 1000GB limit on your account and
get more bandwidth.
As a SOHO or company grows, the need for more bandwidth is paramount
especially if you have an intranet in your office or you have people
accessing the back end of your web-site to load data from various
locations.
Dedicated web hosting is what the majority of individuals and small
businesses use until they start growing out of their bandwidth. They
usually upgrade their web hosting packages and buy more storage and
bandwidth.
Using Unmanaged Host Services
If you are a customer that wants total control of your web site
administrative functions then you might want to look at unmanaged
web hosting services to give you complete remote control
administration over your server. The technical side of the server
can be controlled by a designated administrator that you pick to
handle your web information.
You have to have a technical person to install the server and manage
the server if you don’t have the expertise because you as the
customer will be responsible for maintaining the server environment.
That’s why unmanaged servers are recommended for individuals and
businesses with server administration resources.
As far as developing applications and controlling the applications
without going through technical support personnel on the managed
server side, these types of servers are usually used when companies
are developing real time response systems on the internet, such as
geographical, science, engineering and multimedia/entertainment
applications.
Unmanaged servers allow you to add extra hard disk space to increase
your space capacity and many computer companies sell physical
servers that are configured for unmanaged hosting applications.
Companies like Dell and HP have software programs that not only will
run an office network but also handle web server and development
applications.
Small businesses that don’t need a server on site and deal with
administrative web packages should go with the managed host packages
that provide assistance and administrative support. Managed
applications will do just fine because of the costs that are
incurred with maintaining an unmanaged server. Unmanaged servers
need constant upgrades of software and hardware constantly which
could cost your small business a big chunk of change.
Unmanaged servers are expensive to maintain and run unless you are a
small firm that develops in house web applications. The best advice
is to have a consultant draw up an IT plan to see if you need this
type of hosting service or not.
