Thinking about having a website for your existing business? Or do you want to start a new project and looking for a website host? Or let me guess, your existing web hosting company is the reason you are reading this article because you just can’t hear that - server is down due to DoS (denial of service) attack, we are going through an upgrade process, we are experiencing a hardware failure or (my personal favorite) your IP was blocked on our server, excuses one more time. Trust me! The customer support staff of these bad quality hosting companies is highly skilled in excuses.

Your hosting provider plays a great role in your online ventures. You do not want your website to be down when a customer is looking for it. You also won’t find it very pleasant when you recently updated your website with new contents and a few hours later your host had to install the backup created yesterday in order to fix some problem and all your new contents and changes are now gone. These are quite common problems among small business web hosting providers but you can avoid them by signing up with a reliable host.

So the question is, what should you look for in a small business web hosting company? There are many technical things that you want to look for and we will discuss them later but first things first, make sure they have a top notch customer service. Yes you need the space and reliability and all that, but trust me if the customer service is not good, the company is most likely to let you down on everything else, especially reliability. The best way to find that out is through searching for reviews of your prospective small business web site hosting company.

Uptime is one of the most important things that you should look at, make sure your small business web hosting comes with a guaranteed 99.5% or higher uptime. Bandwidth is also very critical. It is the amount of bytes transferred when a visitor browses through your site. How much bandwidth you would need, really depends on the nature of your web site. If you are anticipating a huge amount of traffic you should probably look for higher bandwidth. But don’t fall for “unrestricted bandwidth” trap. The host that guarantees “unlimited” bandwidth is not being completely honest with you because it’s never limitless, they pay for bandwidth usage and basically cannot provide unrestricted bandwidth for no extra cost. Some other important feature that you should get with your small business website hosting includes FTP access, email, autoresponder, mail forwarding, control panel etc.

But remember, before you proceed to obtain a small company website hosting service, you ought to always look for reviews from trusted providers. Do not worry about the cost too much, because it probably will be the lowest cost your business has to bear.

Everyone wants to be on the internet, the opportunities in the internet are limitless.  However, when you say you want to be on the internet, what exactly is entailed in being on the internet.Having a presence on the internet requires only a few things, a domain registration, a website hosting and an .ftp upload program.Now if your mind just fogged over and you decided to stop ready, WAIT!.  Keep going, we are going to explain this is pretty simple terms for those of you who aren’t internet savvy, yet.  So unfog your brain for a few minutes and hang in there.The internet is a huge highway and parking lot sale and a website is the parking lot where you have items displayed.

Domain Registration

Domain registration is fairly easy to understand, its your name, or your parking lot on the internet.  Once you find a catchy name, not already taken, you will register that name and that registration usually comes along with a website hosting product.  It is you .com, though other choices are now available such as .biz, .net, .org, .tv, etc.  Doesn’t sound so bad, does it?  You can check to see if your domain is still available by using the WHOIS.

Website Hosting and Small Business Web Hosting

I list these two headings together because they are related.  Website hosting is a service that is offered by ISP (internet service provider) for a fee.  The fee is generally associated with a package of services that you can buy from the ISP.  One of those services is a small business web hosting which provides a package of the services that most small businesses will need to get a website up and running.  Otherwise, website hosting packages come with email, storage space and bandwidth choices.  Once again I heard your brain fog over.  

E-mail is the number of mailboxes you need, storage space is the amount of space your website will take up and bandwidth is how much transfer of bits is involved in your website.  To go back to our parking lot analogy, your storage space is the size of your parking lot, the e-mail is how many mail slots your need and your bandwidth is the traffic in your parking lot.  Figure out your parking lot size by figuring out how many bytes all your website pages and pictures.  

Bandwidth is how much data is transferred each time someone visits your website.  If you website is 1 MB (1000 bytes) and you have 5 visitors a day you use 5000 bytes.  However, remember if you have multiple pages, figure that each visitor will click on each page at least once.  So when you look at your website hosting, look for the amount of these three items needed.

.ftp Program

You have almost survived your website hosting decisions, you just need to determine how you are going to get your website up to the ISP server.To do this you will need a .ftp (file transfer protocol) program.Many website hosting services have a built-in .ftp services and many choices of programs are available.To go back to our parking lot analogy, this is the forklift you use to put your products out for public view.  This program will transfer the files that you have created on your computer, to the computer space you have purchased on your website hosting service’s server.

Website hosting is not a small decision and while we have tried to provide you a humorous look at the decision, choose your website hosting carefully.

For more about web hosting please visit www.webhostingsolutionblog.com