Web Site Hosting

Website Hosting

What Exactly is Web Hosting?
In order for you to connect to a website, the web pages have to exist on a web server that is connected to the internet. The server should be connected directly to the internet by a high speed line. The web server needs to be up and running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, provide data security and be backed-up daily. There are companies whose business is to provide web space. They have the necessary hardware and technical expertise to provide reliable service.

For all but the largest companies, it's usually more cost effective to rent space from from a web hosting company than to operate the web servers at your place of business. Even if you have your own servers, you still need to connect to the internet (usually through an internet service provider).

There are several different kinds of web hosting services available: Free web sites, restricted self hosting services and true web hosting.

Free Websites
What can I say? With a free website, you usually get exactly what you pay for. They usually have extremely slow connections, low bandwidth, frequent downtime, and most require you to place banners for them or other companies on your website. Definitely not an appropriate choice for a business website. You can buy reliable web hosting for under $10 a month. Why settle for poor service.

Self-Hosted Websites
Self-hosted site builders typically offer the fastest, easiest route to a Website. They usually don't require any technical knowledge to build a site because you choose a pre-designed template and add your text or images, and they can be ready to launch within 24 hours. Self-hosted site builders also represent some of the least expensive Website options, partly because they eliminate the need to separately pay a Web hosting provider.

These sites are usually inflexible, only allowing a limited number of Web pages, a limited amount of traffic, offering a narrow selection of templates and preventing you from uploading your own pages. Most can't accommodate the use of complex scripts or other more advanced website features. In fact most don't even allow you to save your web pages in the .html format, which is an absolute must if you ever plan to move the site to another hosting company at a later date.

My advice is to avoid these services like the plague. I would never use them to create a business website. They are fine for a personal web page, but since most internet service providers let you put up personal web pages free, why pay extra for one of these sites.

True Web Hosting
True Web hosting allows you to build your own Web site, upload pages with sophisticated functionality, and modify your site in almost limitless ways. Although most hosting packages offer site-building software, users more frequently build their own sites with Dreamweaver, MS FrontPage or similar software. (Click Here for more information on website design guidelines and Click Here for more information on website design tools.)

Purchasing a hosting account rents space on a web server or the exclusive use of a dedicated server for very large sites and includes a set amount of data transfer traffic from your computer to the host's server, so you can upload entire pages, images, multimedia files, or change existing pages. You can easily integrate eCommerce software into your site (some hosting companies even provide it with your account). But this flexibility doesn't come cheap. Expect to pay a monthly fee of $6-$50, depending on your needs.

How Do You Choose A Web Hosting Company?
There are literally hundreds of thousands, of hosting companies out there. They come in all price ranges, and with all kinds of bells and whistles. If your website is part of your overall business and marketing plan to sell products or services, here are some things you may want to see if a hosting company provides:

Money Back Guarantee - I put this first, because if you are unhappy with your hosting site, you'll want assurances that you'll get your money back. Reputable companies typically provide a 30 day money back guarantee.
24/7 Technical Support – A telephone support number? - none. I have no problem with that. While quite a few companies do not offer phone support these days, they have excellent email communications. It is quicker and cheaper for me to email my hosting service than to use the telephone - no being put on hold, just action. They follow up with a personal note - it's a great system. If you feel you need telephone support, be prepared to pay more for it.
Control Panel - The Control Panel where you control all aspects of your account, such as managing email accounts, reading statistics, and configuring autoresponders. Make sure your hosting company has a centralized control panel for your management needs with good instructions on how to use it.
Website Statistics – From a marketing perspective, it's important to know who is visiting your site and what pages they read. Your hosting company should keep track of all of this information for you, and present it in an easy to read format. Make sure your statistics are updated on a daily basis, and that you can configure the display to show you by day, by week, by month or by year.
CGI Capability - Your hosting company should allow you to install and run CGI scripts on your account. CGI scripts allow you to collect information from your visitors such as having them sign up for a free newsletter. Some hosting companies offer pre-installed CGI scripts as part of your hosting package, such as a message board or email forms.
POP Email Accounts - A POP (Post Office Protocol) Email Account is an email account hosted on your site. Most hosting companies allow you to have more than one POP account, so that you can set up email addresses for all your needs. Also make sure your hosting company supports email forwarding. Email accounts use up a lot of hard disk space. Ideally you don't want to view your email on the server, but have it forwarded to your personal account. For example, all of the email addresses for this website are forwarded to my personal email accounts, so I never have to log into the web server to check to see if I have email from my readers. So, when I open the email client on my desktop PC, I get the email from all of my email accounts in one place.
Autoresponders - Autoresponders allow a visitor to send an email to a specific email address and automatically receive a reply. For example, if you offer a free report, people can send an email to free_report@mydomain.com and automatically receive the report in their email inbox.
SSL Secure Server - SSL (Secure Socket Layer) is a protocol that allows data transmissions to be encrypted on the internet. Whether you need it will depend on your selection of shopping cart software, payment gateway and merchant account providers. (Click Here for more information on Merchant Accounts.)
Shopping Cart - If you plan on having a sales catalog on your website, a shopping cart is required. It lets people browse through your merchandise and pick the items that they plan to purchase and stick them in your shopping cart. When they finish shopping, they proceed to the checkout where they can review their order and pay by credit card. (Click Here for more information on shopping carts.)
Password Protected Areas – If you want to create a "members only" area of your site, you will need to make sure that your hosting company supports password protected areas.
FrontPage Extensions - Microsoft FrontPage is a web development tool. It requires that special software be installed on the web server to use all but the most basic features. FrontPage extensions are available for both Microsoft IIS and Apache web servers. If you plan to use FrontPage make sure the hosting company provides the software. (Click Here for more information on website design software.)
Mailing List Software - Make sure your hosting company allows you to install and run CGI scripts and PHP scripts. These two methods are the most common way of creating double-opt-in mailing lists, where the person signs up and receives a confirmation email that instructs them how to officially sign up for your mailing list.
Streaming Media – Although I don't recommend using streaming media on most business web sites, there are exceptions such as a site dedicated to music or video sales. If you want or need to add multimedia streaming to your website, you'll need to find out if your hosting company supports the use of streaming media such as RealAudio or Windows Media files. Some hosting companies will charge you extra for this service.(Click Here for more information on website design guidelines.)
UpTime and Availability Guarantee - Do they offer a guarantee of uptime? How about availability? Uptime is one of the most important aspects of a business website. Availability should be 100% and uptime should be over 99% and that includes scheduled maintenance downtime. A reliable hosting company will have a data center with gas powered generators, multiple connections to the internet, etc. They will feature it on their web site. Remember, if your customers can't access your website, they can't buy your products and most existing customers won't try to access the website more than twice. New people will never come back.
Backups - How often do they backup their data. Do they backup your data? Does the control panel allow you to backup your website? Most hosting companies do back up your website data but most do not guarantee your website data. You should also backup the data yourself. I develop my websites on my desktop computer. I always have the latest version of a website on my desktop. I also backup them all up to a separate machine and of course, there is a copy of each website on my hosting company's web server. You put a lot of time, effort and money into developing your website. Make sure you back it up.
Hard-Disk Storage Space - This is probably the most misunderstood aspect of web hosting. The entire Ecommerce-Reference-Desk website uses 2MB of hard disk space. I have a motorcycle club as a client that has over a 1,000 high-resolution photographs, ten years worth of newsletter articles, video clips, sound recordings, etc. on their website. It uses less than 100 MB of hard disk space. Make sure your hosting company allows for easy upgrading for disk space. Then start small, get 50-100 MB of space. It's all most businesses will need for a while.
Bandwidth - the more bandwidth the better. Bandwidth effects the speed of data transmission over the internet. The best hosting companies have unmetered bandwidth.

The bottom line: You want to deal with an established company which a reliable network. Remember, it's your business reputation at stake.

Recommended Web Hosting Company

DPW Enterprises Web Design and Hosting
The servers used by DPW Enterprises are in a state of the art data center that provides the highest level of security, safety, redundancy, reliability, salability and technology. They have multiple OC-3 connections to the internet and 24-hour monitoring. Industry reviewers report they have better than 99% uptime. According to Alexa, sites hosted on their servers are faster than 85% of the other sites on the internet.

DPW Enterprises currently utilizes the latest version of the CPanel control panel with features such as mailbox modification, password changes, ftp login modifications, statistical information, and so on. CPanel offers an easy and intuitive interface along with powerfully packed features.

Their customer support includes telephone and email access. If you want telephone support, these folks have it. I've used their services for the past 6 years and there has been on 15 minutes of unscheduled downtime during that entire time.

The company even provides inexpensive training materials so you can learn how to maintain your own site. Click here for more information on hosting with DPW Enterprises Web Design and Hosting

Use an All-in-One Solution
I normally don't recommend an all-in-one solution. But, Sitebuildit is an exception. You will find here everything, absolutely everything, you need to start your own ecommerce venture including:

FREE training materials and educational courses
ebooks on all aspects of ecommerce ebusiness
Software and tools to assist you in preparing your ebusiness blueprint
Domain registration and web hosting
Tools for your Website design and development
Strategies for getting traffic to your website
....and a host of other services....

It's all available from a single source which means that you don't have to worry whether one component will fit into another or not. And the price you pay - well let me know if there is a comparable product available at the same price. I find it un-believingly low priced.

This product allows you to create your own HTML coded pages if you want to and then just upload them. Or , you can use the online tools to do everything without knowing anything about creating web pages.

Even though I created and maintain the web pages and content on this site using Dreamweaver and I sell basic web hosting on another site I have, I used the SiteBuildit system to set up this site because of the comprehensiveness of the tools and services that are included and the low cost. Although my web space would have been free, this system comes with automated tracking and submission tools. Just the time I save that I can spend earning money by not having to do the tracking and submission myself pays for the system.

There will also be a complete ecommerce package available soon. Click Here for more information on this All-in-One web site design and hosting solution.

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