Small Business Web Hosting Guide

Before you start going through below small business web hosting guide, I would like suggest you go through Basic Web Hosting Guide first, you will find very comprehensive and general guide for web hosting, not just for small business, and it would be helpful for you to understand what we said in below.

Why We Need to Create a Web Site for Our Small Business

No need to explain more on this one, you would be able to give out more reason than I can do. And below are just part of them:

• Build credibility: Customers expect to find you online
• Makes it easy for prospects to learn about your company, contact you, or get directions to your location
• Expands your reach beyond your local geographic area
• Enables you to pursue a host of targeted, low-cost marketing strategies

Choose a Domain Name for Your Small Business Web Site

First, you will need to select a domain for your small business web site, think about something that will make sense to your business and easy to be remembered. For more about what's domain, and how to find a best name for your small business site, please refer to Select the Best Domain Name

What kinds of Web Hosting You Need for Your Small Business Web Site

1. Basic Web Hosting Requirement for a Small Business Web Site

This section will discuss about the general requirement of web hosting plan for small business, such as disk space, band width, reliability, etc. Those are the basic feature you need to think about when you look for a web hosting plan.

• For small business site, a shared Linux Server web hosting plan is the best choice unless you really want to use ASP or .Net to build you site, which will cause you more time and more money.
• About reliability, 99.9% uptime is expected. Don't get your in-stable web site hurt your business. And high access speed is also required. Your customer will visit your competitor's web site if yours is too slow
• Disk space will heavily depend on what you want to put online, but normally, you will use less than 100M. You might see most of the web hosting companies provide you a solution with huge disk space like 10g, 50g. Just take it, disk space doesn't cost you too much.
• For Email account, 100 eMailBox will be enough in most cases and most of web hosting companies will give you more than you require if their plan target at small business web hosting market.
• Need the basic e-commerce cart support if you want your customer make a purchase on the web site, such as: Shopping Cart, Paypal, or SSL support. But if your web site is just used to publish some information about your company or introduce your business, then e-Commerce support is not important for you.
• What about the server location? Place the server close to your targeted visitor would be a good idea, even you are not in that country. For example, if you want to sell something in USA, it would be better to host your site in in USA so that your visitor can access the server faster, and it also a way to show your respect to your customer.
• Usually you will get a free domain when you order a web hosting plan, and if you only want one web site, I would like suggest you to get a web hosting plan that only host one site. Don't pay for what you don't need. But if you have plan to build more than one web site, then you will need to choose a plan which can host more than one site, this kinds of plan will save you a lot money and you will only need to pay for the annual fee for Domain.
• Support: We recommend you to order a web hosting plan which includes 24*7 professional courteous support with toll free phone to make sure the issue of the web site can be resolved quickly. And the good news here is some top web hosting companies have get this kinds of support center setup with very low cost, and it will not cost you too much.

2. Advanced requirement of Web Hosting Plan for Small Business Web Site

In this section, we will discuss about what advanced requirement you might want from web hosting company. Besides hosting your web site, you might want something to help you setting up the web site and promoting it easily. Below are some more options which web hosting company might add to their web hosting plan.

• Free Advertising Credit

Get some advertising credit from Google or Yahoo to promote your web site and drive the traffic to your business site, it's a good start to practice your internet marketing skill. There are many companies giving your some free Advertise Credit, which is even greater than $100, such as midPhase.

• SEO Tools

We will need some SEO tools to help us promoting the web site (about what's SEO, please refer to Web Promotion), you might want web hosting company can provide those kinds of tools so that you have no need to searching the internet and find one.

• Web Design Tools

If you or your team know about HTML, and the usage of the tool like Frontpage, you will no need to have Web Design tools in your web hosting plan, otherwise, it would be good to have some basic web design tools included otherwise you will have to pay some more money to get someone else to build the web site.

3. Price

No great comment for this one, just keep in mind that you pay for what you get.

Web Hosting Plan for Small Business Web Site

Small business web hosting is the largest market of Web Hosting industry. So, we can say you are lucky and unlucky at the same time. Lucky here means you will have a lot of companies to choose from, but unlucky side is it's really too many there and not all those companies can provide what they promise, you might be scammed and put your business in risk. So you will have to search the internet, compare a lot of different plans and read the web hosting review document. It would take you a lot of time and make you tired. In WebHostingClue, we try to make us a comfortable and reliable web hosting marketplace for those who is looking for web hosting solution. We have spent a lot of time on studying the industry of web hosting, and carefully select a list of the reputed companies which are providing web hosting plan for small business web site, Now let's go to Best Small Business Web Hosting to see what those web hosting plan are.