The choice of a small business to open a website and have a presence on the internet is not a small one. There are voluminous choices for small business web hosting available and most offer both Windows and Linux web hosting. Learning how to make a choice about the small business web hosting packages offered is essential.

Available Platforms

Make sure the small business web hosting provider offers both Windows web hosting and Linux web hosting platforms. It is not unforeseeable you may choose to change platforms. If you decide to change and your small business web hosting provider doesn’t offer both platforms, you will end up having to make this decision again.

Evaluating Small Business Web Hosting Packages

When you are preparing to evaluate the small business web hosting services available you need to make sure that you understand the terms used. The most common terms used are bandwidth, e-commerce, storage space, gateway and e-mail. You need to carefully consider each.

Bandwidth choices offered by small business web hosting is the amount of transfer of data. To determine this, make sure you know how you will be using your website. Is this a come and look at our products and then visit our store, is this going to be your main retail outlet, or is this going to be for your employees to access business data. Each of these different functions will require different amounts of bandwidth. Whatever your choices, carefully consider how much traffic you will be generating and choose a small business web hosting package that provides the bandwidth you need. Make sure your have some room to grow and account for spikes in traffic, if you are expecting periods of higher use at different times.

E-Commerce

E-commerce is simply the internet shorthand for having an entire store on the internet with checkout and payment processing. Small business web hosting usually includes some type of e-commerce choice and your website developer will have input into this decision, because the payment processing choices must be built into the website.

Storage Space

The amount of storage space your company needs is again dependent on type of factors you looked at in bandwidth. This however, is simply the amount of bytes you will place on the small business web hosting server. This includes your webpages, pictures, documents, calendar, other items that will be included and room to grow. Websites need to change, to keep their search engine placement, make sure you account for this in your storage space on the small business web hosting.

Gateway

A gateway is an e-commerce credit card processing portal for your website. Often the gateway is purchased from your current credit card processing service.

E-Mail

Many small business web hosting services provide a set number of e-mail boxes using an amount of shared space. These are ideal for the regular work and e-mailing done by employees. However, small business web hosting also offers e-mail boxes which aren’t shared space and are more amenable to e-mail boxes where data transfer is going to occur on a regular basis. Evaluate the e-mail boxes and designate your e-mail space between them, considering your small business web hosting choices that offer separate e-mail space when expect to have very high volume or data transfer e-mail boxes.

Overall evaluation of a small business web hosting service is one of your first steps in website development. Many of the choices to be made in development of your page will be dependent on your small business web hosting package.

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 site. 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.

You’ve sweated and worked to make your webpage exactly what you want, you have all your files ready, so how do you get it onto the internet? To make your webpage appear on the internet you need to find a web hosting service. It’s not as bad as it sounds, there are many choices available in a web hosting service. However, before you purchase a web hosting service you need to identify what you want from the service. You need to make choices about bandwidth, e-mail boxes and server storage space. It sounds very confusing, doesn’t it, let’s see if we can clear it up a bit.

Web Hosting Service Bandwith

Bandwidth is a strange concept for those of us who didn’t grow up in the digital age. If you remember your Commodore Computer, then this explanation is for you. Bandwidth is your traffic. How much, and how many people are visiting your site, or in a car analogy, how many people are entering your parking lot. For you who are more digitally inclined, it’s the amount of bits that are transferred between the server and whoever is visiting the site. To put it into prospective so you can make an estimate, a MP3 song is about 4 MB (megabytes) or 4000 bytes, a movie is around 900 MB or 9000 bytes.

Judge the size of each page of your website, by adding up the amount of bytes (don’t forget to include your pictures). Each person who visits your website and clicks on that page will use that many bytes. It’s going to take a bit of guessing or predicting, but give yourself a little extra, remember you want the extra traffic. So make room for the extra traffic, and monitor your bandwidth. You may need to increase your bandwidth with your web hosting service, and most companies will allow you to go up in bandwidth without much of a problem, but going down in bandwidth can sometimes be tricky.

Web Hosting Service E-Mail Boxes

This one is not going to be overly difficult, you just need to figure out how many people you want to have their own e-mail box at your domain with your web hosting service. If your domain is www.widgetsunlimited.com, lets say, then you will need to know that joeschmoo@widgetsunlimited.com is one e-mail box, in the view of your web hosting service. Remember to make sure that you have a general e-mail box and give yourself a little room to grow.

Web Hosting Service Server Storage Space

This one is also not very confusing. You need to determine how much space your page will take up on the Web Hosting Service provider’s server. You can do this by listing all the items that will go onto the webpage, including pictures. Add up all the bytes in space and that will give you the amount of space you need, at a minimum for your website hosting. Do not make the mistake of buying exactly the amount you calculated. You will be making changes, fixing items, adding items, and other changes to your website, plan ahead. Give yourself additional space in your website hosting plan, to account for additions, changes and upgrades. If you don’t give yourself extra space when you decide on a web hosting service you will be sorry in the long run.

Now see, most of that didn’t hurt at all, and now you are ready to evaluate web hosting services and decide on a good website hosting plan for you.

Are you looking for low cost web hosting services? If so, at least you can rest assured knowing that there are some terrific low cost web hosting services out there, and you just need to find the right web hosting service which is not only going to be affordable but as well offer you all the features and services that you are looking for and need for your business to strive.

Why You Need Hosting

Before you can find the right low cost web hosting services, you are going to want to learn more about web hosting in general and why your business needs it.

A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and their businesses or organizations to provider their own website and make it accessible via the Internet. Therefore, if you want your website to be visible to Internet users, you are going to have to go through a web hosting company.

Top Rated Web Hosting Services

Host Monster is definitely one of the leaders here. They offer various web hosting plans which include unlimited hosting space, unlimited site bandwidth, host unlimited domains, unlimited POP/IMAP email accounts, SSH access, SSL, FTP, stats, front page extensions, free site builder, and the best support in the industry.

They have been providing hosting solutions to thousands of business and personal websites since 1996, so you know that they have the experience and knowledge that you are looking for. Their Internet hosting package helps businesses and individuals to get high powered service at a fraction of the cost.

Immotion Hosting

Immotion Hosting is another great option. They are a reliable and respected company, one that truly understands business of all sorts and not just e-business. They offer fast, reliable and affordable hosting, and their web hosting network is based on the fast and reliable Linux and Unix operating systems.

It is monitored around the clock, 24/7, for any unusual activity and benchmarked continuously for performance. This means that you are always getting the best, most reliable server at all times.

Any one of these low cost web hosting services would be a perfect choice but know that there are also quite a few other low cost web hosting services that you may want to consider as well. You are going to be trusting your business and its potential success in the hands of this business, so choose wisely.

If you are curious about domain hosting, which is also known as domain registration, whether you are interested in learning about domain hosting for personal or professional purposes, there is some information that is going to be very useful to you.

What it is

Domain hosting is the process by which a business or organization can secure a website domain. Once you have the domain registration, the domain becomes yours for the period of the contract, which in most cases you will need to renew on a regular basis, usually annually.

Domain registration is available via a registrar, and fees and services will vary from one company to another and so you are going to want to make sure that you take a bit of time to shop around so that you can find the most affordable option.

Keep in mind that you will be able to choose your own domain name, however the one that you are thinking of may already be taken so you will want to have a couple of backups.

Upon completing the domain registration process, it will usually take a period of about a few hours to see the domain online, but in the meantime you will see a notice that lets users know it will be up and running soon. Parking a domain, which means that you are basically holding onto it until the site is ready to get up and running, is very inexpensive.

Finding a Company

Of course when you are looking for a domain hosting company, make sure that you find the most low cost web hosting company you can, and the Internet is really going to be the best resource available to you here.

Make sure that you check out all the top choices and then learn a bit more about each. Making yourself educated here is the only way that you are going to be able to make the best choice in terms of which company is going to offer the most to your business.

Make sure that you have all questions answered before agreeing on any one particular company, and you are also going to want to ask about any additional options that are available.

Domain hosting is an integral and necessary part of any website and if you have a business these days you must have a website so that people from all over the world are able to access it and your business will prosper as much as possible.