So you’re finally planning to start your small business website.
Congratulations!
The next step now is to find the right web host not only for your business budget but one that can handle everything your site will need.
There’s an almost infinite number of things you can do with your site, whether it’s for personal use or for taking your business online. But to make the most of this opportunity, you’ll need to do some careful advance planning. And when it comes to your advance preparations, in this as in so many other things, size does matter.
Why Advanced Planning Can Save You Time And Money
Before you can start looking at potential hosts for the website, you must first take a look at yourself.
Just what is it you plan to do on this site? Play?
Do business?
Archive photos?
Upload Videos?
Do you think the site will stay more or less the same size for its lifetime, or can you foresee a lot of expansion in times to come?
Will you be using WordPress, Joomla, Drupal or a static HTML to create your online business site?
You have to assess not just your present needs, but those of the future as well before you can make an intelligent decision about what hosting package is suitable for your business.
One of the reasons size matters is that some hosts limit how big your site can be. If you’re at a free hosting website, these limits may be absolute, so the host can keep their costs contained. If you choose a paid hosting site, expansion beyond your initial size could push you into a much higher price bracket on your plan.
Some hosts also place limits on the size of files you can upload, which could mean restrictions on the amount of graphics or other extras you can place on a single page.
If your site is mainly informational, so the pages will sit there and not change too much, it will be a certain size, but if you want to make this a transactional website, a portal through which you and your visitors do actual business, it’s going to be much bigger.
If you are thinking about taking your business online and are not sure where or how to start we are here to help, just shoot us an email, and we will contact you to answer any of your concerns before you spend one cent on domain registration, hosting or web design.
Make Sure You Ask About Bandwidth Usage
Another way a host could limit you might be in the amount of bandwidth you use each day or month. This refers to the amount of traffic your site gets, by people visiting it, linking to it, downloading from it, ordering things through it, and so on. If you plan for your site to be just a casual place for friends and family to drop by sometimes, this restriction might not even concern you, though you should still check what the limits are.
However, if you’ve got a business site, you’re aiming for rather a lot of traffic, probably sooner rather than later. So you’ll need to have some idea about what sort of traffic you’re likely to get when you first start, and how much (you hope) it will increase as your site and business become better known.
Things To Consider For A Business Site Are These
- Are you going to be adding more content daily, weekly or monthly
- Will you be hosting videos on your site pages/posts
- What type of information, will you be uploading images for tutorials and how to’s
- Will you be running scripts in PHP or Javascript
These are just some considerations you need to think about when choosing a web host as they all have an impact on your web site and how it will perform online.
So you have to know or plan for several things before you can even start evaluating web hosts, and one of the most important first steps is to assess your size, both now and in the future. And just to be on the safe side, in this case, it probably doesn’t hurt to exaggerate your size. Just a little so that you are not having to change plans and hosting servers as you business grows.
For anyone wanting to have full control of their website hosting then we highly recommend using Hostgator, they offer some very affordable plans, and the tech support is 24/7.
Or for more business orientated people you can use our hosting service which is on a very powerful dedicated server with Hostgator where we will manage all aspects of your hosting for you, leaving you to run your day to day business without any of the hassles or headaches associated with website hosting.
This web host option is only available to clients who are using or planning to use our site creation packages.
