Online Business

Don’t Let Bad E-Commerce Web Hosting Cost You Business

A reliable web hosting company is crucial especially if you operate a business on the internet offering products for sale the require you to have e-commerce web hosting with shopping carts. Unless you have some mega store it is unlikely that you will need your own servers which could cost you several hundred dollars a month, but you do need e-commerce that is reliable and trustworthy that has a good reputation for uptime. When you are running an online business servers being down is the equivalent of having the doors locked in a brick and mortar business.

One of the great things about web hosting is that you have a myriad of choices ranging from low end shared hosting for less than $10 per month to having high end dedicated servers than run well over $300 per month. Whichever one you choose I still recommend you have someone else do the management of the servers for you unless you are a techno geek.

There are many web hosting companies that offer services with specific e-commerce hosting packages built just for small businesses. Knowing what company to choose is a more difficult decision than trying to find one, not just because of the number of choices of web hosting companies available but because the particular e-commerce web hosting needs vary between different companies. As I mentioned before, it is imperative that you take this aspect of putting your business online very seriously as it can make the difference in success or failure.

One of the key issues that you need to be concerned with when you are looking at e-commerce web hosting packages for your business is how much bandwidth you are allowed. Not having enough bandwidth can hurt your business tremendously especially if you get a good deal of traffic or you sell items that have large downloads as well. The bandwidth is shared by all who are on your server and all the visitors who are on it at any given time so don’t cut yourself short..

Another key issue to look for in e-commerce web hosting is a web hosting company with the fewest “hops” from the internet backbone, hops are basically each server or router that are between the user and the internet backbone, the best of course would be a hosting company that feeds directly from the internet backbone. You should also try to choose a company that has the latest state of the art web server hardware with the most up to date multiple processor servers to avoid any problems.

As mentioned previously reliability is a must as well as redundancy which means they should have more than one backbone provider in case something goes wrong. If you plan on having an online store or large catalogue disk space will definitely be an issue that you will want to address as well. The e-commerce web hosting company you choose should also provide the best security for the online transactions that you will be accepting which at this time is called SSL.

These are the basic e-commerce web hosting features you should have, you may require upgrades such as back end data integration or recurring payment options but those are things you can discuss with the host you choose.

Don’t Let Bad E-Commerce Web Hosting Cost You Business / Gregg Hall

Gregg Hall is an author and internet marketing consultant living in Navarre Florida. For more on inexpensive Web Hosting or other web hosting issues go to http://www.virtualwebhostingplus.com

How To Decide Between Free Web Hosting And Paid Web Hosting For Your Blog

There are many choices for web hosting companies available and for blogging there are many free choices offered as well. The question that comes to mind to me is, “Is free webhosting cheap?” What I mean by that is what is it going to cost me in terms of functionality and accessibility. Let’s take a look at some of the comparisons between free web hosting and paid web hosting.

Unless you have been living under a rock for the last couple of years then you know that blogging has become a formidable force on the internet and has allowed many people to get an online presence that may otherwise have been unable to do so. Many of these people are making their living by blogging and some like Jason Calcanis have become wealthy from it. Jason built a network of blogs over about eighteen months and sold them to AOL for nearly $30 million! That’s a pretty good ROI. Anyway, I digress, back to our discussion on web hosting.

If you have decided that you want to operate a blog your next choice will probably be what blogging platform or software you want to use to accomplish you blogging. Relax, it’s easy. Most of the blogging software out there today is open source which means it’s, you guessed it, free! In this instance free is not a bad thing, I use Wordpress almost exclusively, it is free and has more options that I care to learn or use. There are other blogging software options available, but I won’t go into them here because this article is about web hosting.

As far as web hosting for your blog you can choose free web hosting or paid so let’s take a closer look at our choices. First off, you can choose Blogger which is owned by Google. Blogger is a good program especially for beginning bloggers because it is easy to use, it is web based, and the price is right. It’s free. With that said however, if your intention is to blog professionally and possibly run a large number of blogs with automated content then Blogger is not for you. I have seen Google shut down many blogs because they considered them to be spam. If you want control over your own destiny then you want to use paid web hosting and have your blogs on your own server, or at least a shared server.

Still in the realm of free web hosting you also have a fairly new option from Wordpress who now offers a free web hosting for Wordpress blogs at their .com site as opposed to the .org site where you get the software and plug ins. The problem is that like Google, they are very restrictive with what you can put on your blogs and how you update them.

Another big issue with free web hosting is that you will usually have to display advertising of some sort which “pays” for your web hosting. This is great for the web hosting companies because it gives them tons of virtual real estate out there with their name on it, not so great for you. If you are blogging professionally, and if you are trying to make money for it then you are blogging professionally, you do not want any distractions on your site that leads visitors away from your site unless you are being paid for it like you do when someone clicks on an Adsense ad or affiliate banner.

My recommendation is that you pay for your own hosting because it gives you a wealth of choices, much more storage space, and takes almost all restrictions off of you within reason. There are still some web hosting companies that will not allow you to host gambling or porno blogs but other than that you are pretty open. Paid web hosting is not that expensive. You can get an account that will host as many blogs as most people will want to deal with a few bucks a month. So for the cost of a domain name and your hosting you will probably be around $100 a year. That is a pretty cheap investment for something that enables you to plug into all the ways of earning money on the net.

How To Decide Between Free Web Hosting And Paid Web Hosting For Your Blog / Gregg Hall

Gregg Hall is an author and internet marketing consultant living in Navarre Florida. For more on inexpensive Web Hosting or other web hosting issues go to http://www.virtualwebhostingplus.com

How To Find Web Hosting That Doesn’t Leave You Broke

If you have an online business
or maybe even several like I do, web hosting
can be a significant expense not to mention the fact that reliable web hosting is absolutely crucial to the success of your business. All it takes is a server going down during a big marketing promotion and your reputation suffers. In this article we will explore some of the things to look for in a quality web hosting company for a fair price.

First off let’s get some basics out of the way for those who may not fully understand what web hosting is. Web hosting is simply the place that your website’s files and documents are located which allows your site to be pulled up on the internet. This is why it is crucial that the web host be reliable, if there server isn’t working neither are you.

When you are looking for web hosting online there are so many to choose from that it can be an overwhelming task to try to hone it down to a handful to consider. You need to keep a few things in mind before you get started however, and the first is don’t just go with the cheapest because of that reason. They are the cheapest web host because they aren’t giving certain features so you need to identify basic features that you need before you start shopping.

Some of the basic features that you will want from your web hosting company will be a choice of programming languages, databases, email addresses, bandwidth allowance, disk space and how many domains you are allowed to host. You will also want to know what kind of server and administration or control panel is offered, basically your choices will be Linux or Windows based servers. I prefer Linux servers with Cpanel installed because I am familiar with it and it makes my job a whole lot easier. Linux systems are usually less expensive than comparable Windows web hosting services plus they will offer the MYSQL and PHP programs that you will need for your online business. Most Linux based programming and databases are free, which is another reason why servers offering Linux are less expensive.

It is nearly impossible to find inexpensive web hosting with a Windows based server due to the fact that it cost the hosting company so much to get it in the first place and like anything else in life, that expense is passed on to the end user. To get a Windows based system at the same price as a Linux one you will probably have to give up many features so bear that in mind as well.

When assessing the reliability of a web hosting company do a little research on them, don’t just take their claims of 99% up time on their sales page as gospel. There are many web hosting companies out there that allow spammers to operate on their servers and they end up causing problems for everyone on that server, especially if you are on a shared server that is also sharing a block of IP addresses. You could end up having your site delisted and banned and have your emails blocked because of something someone else is doing.

One way that I like to check out hosting companies support is to either email them or if they have it enabled, have a live chat with them and ask them all my questions. If you email a web hosting company and it takes them awhile to get back to you when you are a prospective client what kind of service do you think they will give you once they have your money?

How To Find Web Hosting That Doesn’t Leave You Broke / Gregg Hall

Gregg Hall is an author and internet marketing consultant living in Navarre Florida. For more on inexpensive Web Hosting or other web hosting issues go to http://www.virtualwebhostingplus.com