Non Technical Web Hosting for Your Business

If you're in business, you need to be part of the largest information resource out there: The Internet. Since the Internet is a collection of networked computer systems, it sounds scary to a non-technical person and can be challenging. This article will explain how to get web hosting in simple terms.

To find the right hosting account, you need a plan before you start sourcing possible web hosts. Once you have prepared your plan, your business can be online in as little as 24 hours!

Planning

Start by defining why you are publishing your business online. This objective will guide your decisions through the rest of the elements and ensure you're making the right choices to achieve your goal.

Avoid a goal like: Get more customers. The Internet is a really big place and a child care center in New Jersey is not going to benefit from Chicago parents looking on their website.

Try to build SMART goals:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Reasonable
- Time (within a specific time)

For example, a remote restaurant (let's call them Remote Rachel's) may want their objective to be:

"Offer our menu and provide for an interactive way to get directions from any location to our restaurant to increase return customers by 10% within 6 months".

That SMART Goal breaks down like this:
- Specific: Offer our menu and provide interactive way to get directions from any location
- Measurable: Increase return customers by 10%
- Achievable/Reasonable: Is it possible and reasonable to increase return customers by 10% in 6 months? Possibly, the best judge is the business owner
- Time: Within 6 months

Once you have your goal, refer to it in every other step you take in order to ensure you stay on target. There are a lot of options on the Internet, if you come across one that does not support your goal - drop it and find one that does.

Hosting

No business just starting on the Internet is likely to get hundreds and thousands of visitors each day so you don't need an expensive hosting package.Virtual Hosting Account

Look for a web host that has a product called "virtual hosting". The accounts are approximately $10 to $20 per month and are more than sufficient for starting your site (if your website traffic explodes, you can always upgrade).

Virtual Hosting accounts have a number of primary elements:

Disk Space
How much storage space you have for pictures, web pages, and email messages. Web content is generally not huge so 5 to 10 GBs should be sufficient

Data Transfer
Represents the amount of data visitors to your site are downloading per month. 500GBs or more is going to be plenty to start.

Email Accounts
This represents the number of individual email accounts you get on your domain. Most hosts are offering unlimited email accounts so you, your account manager, your employees, etc can all have separate and private email accounts

Email Forwarders
Not to be confused with Email Accounts, Email Forwarders represent additional email addresses that go to one email account. For example, you can have me@yourcompany.com as your email account and then have customerservice@yourcompany.com, technicalsupport@yourcompany.com and webmaster@yourcompany.com all send their emails to your me@yourcompany.com email account. These are not separate email accounts.

Databases
A method of storing information and interacting with online applications like a Content Management System. You likely won't need more than 10 databases to run your business applications but you will need some. More is definitely better as web hosts offer unlimited Databases

URLs
A URL is what people will type into their browsers to get to your site. Some virtual hosting accounts will allow you to have more than 1 URL working with your account. This is a great feature to look for if you expect to have more than 1 URL. In most cases for your business, you will want to maintain 1 URL

Free URL
I don't recommend you take advantage of a free URL offer through your hosting company. The terms state the URL has to stay with that hosting company, which means you will not be able to move it to another later if you have it with them. URL's are between approximately $15 per year each so it is not a significant expense to have a separate URL account with a different company.

Support
A good virtual host will offer technical support to any of their customers regardless of size. Try to assess testimonials, search the company name online to see if there are other articles about their business history and assess their ability to provide support. Virtual hosting accounts will take care of your technical questions if you find the right one.

Key Feature for Non-Technical People

Look for a host that offers additional programs for free (sometimes called "auto installed) to manage your website content like Joomla, Drupal, and/or WordPress. These are free content management systems (CMS) that allow you to build your website just like you were in a word processor. You can upload pictures, write your pages and change the layout of your site without knowing a lick of HTML (the programming language the Internet is mostly based on).

By reviewing your potential web host versus your plan, researching the hosting company for their features and support, you will stay on target and get the best hosting plan available for your business.