Small Business Web Hosting
Small business web hosting is a great way to ensure your firm
has all its website needs catered for. There are lots of companies
out there that offer their services but there are a variety of
factors that you should as a business be looking out for when
it comes to choosing a hosting provider that suits your needs;
Price
This is often one of the top priorities for businesses. However,
price should not be main factor as this can often be quite misleading.
Don’t forget that you get what you pay for. Below are a
few things that fall within price of web hosting. You should consider
these before making your final decision.
Reliability and Server Speed
Since your website is your company's online presence, a reliable
small business web hosting company has to be absolutely vital.
You have to be sure that their servers have facilities such as
load balancing and have an absolute minimum of 99.99% uptime.
There are two reasons for this, firstly, potential visitors can
come to your site at any time of the day or night and secondly,
if your site is down, this may be the time when search any crawlers
decide to visit your page. If this happens then this could be
seen as quite detrimental to your site's indexing in Google, MSN,
Yahoo etc.
In addition, if your business website is hosted on slow servers,
then this can potentially reflect on you as a company. The best
thing is to try and choose a web hosting company that offers good
speed and reliability. You can often find good hosts through many
of the review sites that are online.
Backup
In today's fast movement digital environment, data is the one
thing that is worth its weight in gold. Its not wonder that if
you have any data that you store online such as mailing databases
or just your website, that this be backed up by your host. It
is therefore imperative that any web host who caters for small
businesses has this as part of their package.
Security
Security is also an aspect that needs to be taken very carefully,
any business web hosting company must take all the necessary measures
to ensure that they cannot be hacked. There are always reports
of companies getting hacked so it important you choose a company
with a good reputation.
Brand Name & Credibility
Reputation and credibility are also key factors when deciding
small business web hosting. Would you rather pay a company a little
extra knowing that you will get a good service and your websites
are safe or pay a nominal hosting fee and have poor support and
downtime? As a business owner, we know what most people would
go for.
Features
Nowadays, gone are the days where all you needed was some web
space and pop3 email account access. If you prefer windows hosting
then you may want features such as Microsoft Exchange Server boxes,
calendars and more.
With linux hosting comes services such as cPanel and Fantastico
which seem to be the norm these days. This means that you can
setup Wordpress blogs, addon domains, email forwarding and setup
a ton of scripts in a matter of minutes. You do not need any knowledge
of programming or 'FTPing'. Small business web hosting has come
a long way in the last few years and is getting better all the
time. When choosing a web host, features must definitely be looked
at to see what you are getting for your money and more importantly
if these fit within your requirements.
Support
Support is something that can save you a lot of time and headache.
Most small companies may not be able to afford their own in house
IT team so when choosing your web hosting company, try to make
sure you choose one with some kind of support. This may be either
email, telephone or both. Sometimes you may need to pay a little
extra for the type of support you want but it's always worth it.
In our opinion all small
business web hosting packages should come with this as standard!
|
