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Business Web Hosting
Knowing what to look for when looking for small business
web hosting can greatly help your chances of success in your online business.
In the fast-paced world of business, there are many ways to advertise your
company. Arguably the biggest way to increase sales in a cost effective manner
is by having an online presence. Having a corporate or business web site both
to provide information to existing clients, and to attract more potential customers
by way of the search engines is essential nowadays to survival of businesses
in competitive fields. Moreover, knowing the type of web
hosting for small business you need will help you greatly down the road
in terms of hidden costs and overhead, site loading speed and features.
Since your web site is your first contact with visitors on the internet, it
is imperative that your ecommerce web site hosting provides the following:
High server uptime, at least 99%% overall uptime on average.
PHP support (the newest stable version)
MySQL databases. Most businesses will require at least 3-4 if not more, so your
host should provide at least this many with any web hosting package.
CGI
Over 50 POP email accounts
Webmail (in case you do not wish to use a client side email program)
Sufficient bandwidth. 20 GB is sufficient for most small business, and this
amount should be increased in relation to the amount of traffic you receive.
Sufficient space. Very few companies realistically use more than 1 GB of web
space.
Customer support ticket system with reasonable response time – less than
4 hours
Nightly backups to tape with diesel or similar backup power source.
Cpanel, to allow for easier setup of email, scripts and administration.
Support for basic MIME types including Macromedia flash.
Beneficial features:
Fantastico Cpanel.
This program is loaded for scripts which al help the success of the modern businessman.
Fantastico incorporates webblogs, eccomerce shopping carts, and content management
systems all into a very easy-to-use interface.
Subdomain support.
Zend PHP optimizer to assist in programming and access speeds.
Always do your research before committing to a web host. There are many websites
setup as web hosting review sites which claim to be unbiased, and in actual
fact, send business to their own company. Test your hosting for a period of
two months to see if the site is accessible all of the time, and if the load
times are fast.
Articles by Todd Mumford
Todd is server administrator and owner of GDO Web Hosting,
in operation serving thousands of clients since 1999.
This article is available for reprint only under the following conditions:
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Copyright © 2004 All Rights Reserved Todd Mumford
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(1 votes) - Added: 10-22-2005 - Updated: 10-22-2005