Tip for Small Biz Web Hosting

If you're running a small business with an online presence. You can choose to have your site hosted with anyone. But you must be careful. Depending on your business growth, your level of service and your need for your site to be up, it may be extremely important that you take precautions when selecting your web hosting package.

Here are few tips you go by that will help you make a decision as to what package is best for you.

# First and most important is the provided support for your website. Is your web hosting company available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If for any reason you experience downtime, then you need to know what is the turnaround time to get it back up and running.

What kind of availability does the company have? How can you contact them? Depending on the level of your business, you may want to speak to a person immediately, not send an email and have to wait for them to get back to you to respond. Your website being up is the lifeline of your business, if it's dead in the water, you're dead in the water.

# Next you want to look at the different hosting plans' prices. Are they reasonable? You may have to weigh the costs with the support. I've purchased hosting as cheap as $3.50 monthly to over $60 a year. It depends on what you're looking for and what you level of service you can afford.

For the most part, web hosting is like everything else in life, you get what you pay for. If you go cheap don't expect world class service. But there are also some others that are downright over expensive for what they provide. You'll have to find a middle ground for what's good for you.

# So what features are provided by the hosting service. For me I always look for unlimited domains and unlimited emails. Although I may not need a lot, it gives me a ton of flexibility to grow as needed. Here are a few things you should look for in a good hosting package:

unlimited domains

unlimited sub-domains

unlimited FTP accounts

PHP support

Fantastico

24 hr support

These are just a few of the things that you should look for from a feature aspect when looking at a web hosting company.

# The final thing we'll look for in our web hosting package is disk storage and bandwidth. Disk storage is the equivalent of the amount of space on your C: drive. The more space you have, the more room you have to store files, documents, videos, music, etc. I would recommend (depending on business need of course) starting out at 80GB.

Bandwidth is actually the amount of information a person can download from your website. It has a bearing on the functionality of your website. If you have a 100GB in band width, and you have a download that is 50KB in size, then you can actually have 20,000 people download your file (100GB = 1,000,000KB. 1,000,000/50 = 20,000). You should get this as large as possible because if you go over you'll more than likely have to pay a fee.

I hope you found these tips helpful. Use them to assist in determining your web hosting for your small business.