Small Business Website Hosting

Choosing the best website hosting companies and services

Setting up a website hosting service can be a little unsettling. What you need to look for is a website hosting company that has 24/7 support services. If you are like me, problems or questions may come in the wee hours of the morning. The other problem is do they have a large enough staff to prevent long waits, 5 to 10 minutes is about standard for the better web hosting companies, when they are busy.

Another area is do they backup your website and how often. Do they have backup power, including generators for long duration power outages. What is their major disaster, (flood, storms, earthquakes, etc.) backup facility setup, such as a remote site. You will find most larger small business website hosting companies will have local and remote backup services available.

Website hosting services

The basic website hosting services that need to be considered are:

• Domain name purchasing
• Domain name registration
• CGI hosting
• Email accounts
• Ecommerce hosting
• FTP hosting
• Secure web hosting
• Shopping cart hosting
• Website Traffic Analyzer
• Website development software

Pros and cons of a small business website hosting

Always keep in mind, when building your small business website, about one third of your potential customers are still on dialup.

Using website frame technology for a business website may be convenient, it can also cause problems with links to your webpages and/or getting a good positions on the search engines.

Using a website hosting website development software can be a problem with a search engine friendly website, which is important in establishing a good position on the search engines. Some of these free website hosting companies website development software programs use a lot of unnecessary coding and can really clutter up a webpage in the source code, which is what the search engine robots see, not what you or your potential customers see on the monitor, and the robot is what brings back the cluttered webpage information to the search engine.

Internet small business resources

• United States Small Business Administration
• Counselors of America's Small Business (Score)