Web Hosting For Business - A quick guide

The ever growing space of internet, which was restricted to a personal computer, is quite amazing and within no time we find everyone having a smart phone. Without internet, most of our days will be too dull without social interactions.

So with the growing boom in internet industry, it is time for businesses to take good use of this facility and to provide a better reach. You could be sitting in a remote place with a small office, but still cater the needs of city customers. Deliver the products, make sure your efforts do reach the needy and you get the repayment that you deserve.

What is web hosting?

To define webhosting in simple terms, it is the location that you purchase (not recommended free hosts - reasons to be mentioned below) for your internet presence. The place where you will host a web page and also run the web services from. 

This might sound similar to purchasing a small/medium office space in your city. 

webservers at Datacenter

This web space becomes the identity for your business and it is important that you choose the right spot and right services.

In real world terms, the hosting service providers own servers at a datacenter providing you with disk space or storage space along with bandwidth and speed for people around the world to access. The web services will include providing you with a web server service, database services, file transfer services and mail services.

Additionally you can also get hosts which provide you with having subdomains (payment.yourbusiness.tld, shopping.yourbusiness.tld) and addon domains, which allows you to use an additional domain to point on to your website. 

Also the webhosts will provide you with technology like ASP/PHP to create websites on.

Should you purchase new hosting or go for free ?

There are many free webhosting options available, where you will be tempted to move in saving that extra cash - you can find articles like this which should provide you with a comprehensive set of hosts that may help.

But I am strongly against going for free, because you have that much control over your data and services. You may have issues with downtime or service bugs or limitations. Eitherway, you can't complain about this as you are freeloading on their servers. Also you may encounter bad reputation to the website and google/search engines may blacklist the whole IP range used, if any of your neighboring websites are abusing the server.

There are thousand more points which will go against the free hosting for your business - you can find an excellent article from sitepoint (a webhost - selected in random) which explains the whole trouble: http://www.sitepoint.com/web-hosting-why-pay/

So free hosting is best for personal ( again privacy issue prevails), but still for single page websites, these shouldn't be an issue. Also if you want to test out a code or similar, you may still use this platform. But for business, there is a big no!

5 Points to take care while purchasing your hosting account

There are millions of webhost around and you may find it extremely difficult to choose from one. We have many marketing geeks working in the industry which makes it more difficult to find the right choice. But I will try to explain few quick points which should help you reach the right one.

1. Cost Of Hosting : This largely depends on the budget that you keep for advertising or running your business online. For popular webhosting websites, you will need to be converting your local currency into US dollars. So bear in mind this part while you fix your webhost.
   
   You could get a webhost for as low as 1 dollar to few cents - but this should be chosen carefully and may only be a marketing technique. US$ 4 per month (as of 2015) can be considered an average for business hosting for small businesses.
   
   Also you should to take into consideration the resources that you receive with each plan as there may be restrictions which are not advertised!
   
2. Hosting Support : I find that there are instructions around the web to go for a one with live support. But, being in the industry for more than a decade, I feel its not the best to always chat for support!
   
   Because the panic chat will do you no good than to distract the technician assisting you with this. Wait for the mail, that way you will have a better hold of what you are conveying to the support team.
   
   But then again, you should find a hosting company that provides 24/7 with a SLA on tickets under 15 minutes, just to be sure that they are working on it. Usually most of the webhosting companies offer 24/7 support, but in reality there may be hours when you get a slow response, so be sure to choose the timezone in which you are purchasing hosting from. Support is also needed for sorting out your issues, most of the small/medium businesses will still be looking at shared hosting solutions. Which I will discuss on later issues.
   
3. Read the Service Level Agreement and Acceptable Use Policy, these documents are tiring, but yes this is required for your business, as hosting companies may have different policies set for various factors like sending mass mail, selling/purchase of certain commodities and similar. So to avoid your website being shutdown due to this - which is again a waste of time and energy - its always good to go through the points thoroughly.
   
   Also read through the documents on what is supported by technical assistance team and if they do have any restrictions on certain installations and changes. Also check for the uptime info displayed and also check if you do have network uptime info available online.
   
4. Ask for addons/discounts : As always, try options with the sales team of each support and ask them for any running campaigns or any addons that you might get with a small additional price/free.
   
   As the saying goes, there is no wrong in asking the sales team about this, you may receive some cool offers and some amazing addons to resources for your hosting account. While you are there, try to get an idea of the hardware and Datacenter facility, most support teams will not provide you specifics due to security reasons - but you could well get the idea of how the hardware is maintained.
   
   Also it is important to ask, if they provide for upgrade of your account (there will be no hosts which wont allow) but do check if you will get any additional discounts or features when you upgrade or pay upfront or the likes.
   
5. Ask the sales team about the control panel and user interface available for your account. Ask specific details on what all you can do and what all features can be added over. Usually, CPanel/Plesk is the client level control panel available. But most hosting solutions will be having an additional panel for managing billing and other upgrades.
   
   Ask for a demo panel where you can test out and feel comfortable with.

So with these I guess I have covered on what all you will need to find that perfect space for hosting your business. We will meet on the other side with details on how to proceed further with this.