Basic Features of Business Web Site Hosting Services
Let’s talk about what your basic business Web site looks like and does for you.
A basic business Web site consists of one or more Web pages that contain (not surprisingly) just basic information about your business.
The point is to help people who are doing online search for a business like yours to find your business. Then they can contact you by phone or by e-mail, or see the map you so thoughtfully provided on your page.
A site like this is generally static, meaning it doesn’t interact with the visitor and doesn’t sell things directly to them, and — good news — doesn’t require you to update it very often. Like a standing ad in the Yellow Pages of your telephone directory.
Let’s say you offer consulting services. A consultant site is usually not much more than an elaborated resume that describe the consultant’s areas of expertise, location, and contact info, along with work samples or pictures or links if that’s relevant.
For a product site, you might add a list of your products, along with descriptions and maybe pictures, perhaps technical info or specs. You’d also explain how to order or how to contact a sales rep, or how to contact customer support by phone or email.
If your products are technical, you might add tech support info such as an FAQ (list of frequently-asked questions) and a tech-support phone number.
For a restaurant, add a menu, a map of your locations, your hours of operation, and a reservation phone number. For a retail store or a service such as a plumber or towing service or electrician, you can list services and perhaps prices.
The main thing is that your Web site helps people find you, reach you, and ultimately buy from you.
We’ll take a look at particular Web host services below. First, though let’s demystify some of the basic features and buzzwords so you know what you’re buying.
Domain Name
You need a domain, or location on the Web for your Web site. This is just your Web site address, like “allbusiness.com” for us. If you already own a domain, the Web hosting service will use that. If not, then they will, for a small fee, register a domain for you.
It’s hard to get primary domain, like “www.allbusiness.com,” these days — because so many people got there ahead of you that all the obvious names are already taken, leaving you with sometimes awkward alternatives like “www.bobshouseofpancakesineastcastrovalley.com”. If you don’t believe us, check the online directory service WhoIs, try out some name ideas, and see what you get. (If the one you really like miraculously comes up, by all means grab it — it costs less than $100 to start and $50 a year to hold a domain name. Network Solutions is one well known seller of domain names; there are hundreds of others.)
A good thing about owning your own domain is that you can move it to another Web hosting service if you get mad at the one you’re at.
If that’s too much trouble, just get a “subdomain” from the hosting service, which won’t cost you anything. If you are Bob’s Pancakes, and your hosting service is called SuperHost.com, you could get a subdomain like “bobspancakes.superhost.com”.
The only down side is that if get mad and move to another hosting service, you can’t take “bobspancakes.superhost.com” with you — the “superhost” part would stay behind. If you’ve built up a big fan club, you’d have a job on your hands getting them to switch over. Which is why subdomain hosting is cheap. Most small businesses never get a chance to worry about the problems of having a large online customer base, for better or worse.
Disk Space
Your hosting service provides you with a certain amount of hard-disk space to store your Web site on their servers. The amount varies — a lot, from 200MB to several gigabytes.
Don’t worry about it; whatever they offer should be more than enough for most businesses.
If you need more — you put up tons of product pictures, or decide to offer video tours, or get into e-commerce and catalogs and other options that eat up a lot of disk space — they’ll sell you more. Check the hosting service’s menu of prices to see how much more it will cost to, say, double the basic offering. Consider that your upside risk of future success.
If you don’t like that answer, or you are going for a more ambitious site, here are some rough-and-ready approaches to figuring out your hard drive space needs:
If you have a site already, just look at the amount of disk space the entire thing takes up on your local drive.
If not, but you have most of your graphics already, add that up because that will take more space than anything. If you have twice that much disk space, you’re probably fine.
If your site will need a large database — for tracking user registration, for example, or to hold your product listings — see how big that file is if you’ve got the data already. If not, then use Excel, Access, or another database or spreadsheet program, create the fields of data you’ll need, and add fake filler data. Then see how big the file is.
If you are planning to go big into e-commerce, there’s no way to calculate in advance very well. Just get a big 2-gig service, and see what they charge when you need more room.
These methods aren’t bulletproof, but they will give you a start at gauging which of the many packages offered you ought to buy.
Bandwidth to the Internet
Every time somebody visits your site, the pages they visit and the graphics on those pages are sent to the visitor’s browser. The more visitors you have, and also the more kilobytes of text and pictures that are on your pages, the more stuff goes back and forth on the Internet, and therefore the more bandwidth you’re using.
Since the Web hosting service pays for access to the Internet, every hosting service has some upper limit on the amount of bandwidth you can use, given as the number of gigabytes downloaded from your site each month by your visitors. Generally you get plenty of bandwidth, especially for a basic business Web site.
If for some reason you become the hot new pancake house, mentioned on national TV or involved in some improbable scandal, and everybody rushes to see your site, you might run out of bandwidth and have to pay to get more. But not likely. There is no easy way to calculate in advance how much bandwidth you’ll use, but again, the Web host will sell you more if you need it.
Tech and Business Support
Strong competition means many Web hosting services offer very low monthly fees. The service can make money if, as much as possible, day-to-day operations are automated and self-service. The simple and very capable tools the vendors provide you for setting up and tweaking your site have the beneficial side effect of letting you do most things yourself, with little need for handholding.
This is because the most expensive single thing for the vendor is providing technical and business support to you for when your site goes down or you have problems getting the system to do what you want.
To keep costs down, most vendors offer only email support for basic customers: If you have a problem, you send an email and wait for an answer. For your basic business Web site, this is fine — it doesn’t cripple your business if the site goes down over the weekend because it’s basically just a convenience for potential customers.
But if you get a lot of visitors who depend on your site, or generate a lot of sales through the site so that it is an important contributor to your business (if for example your restaurant site is bringing in a lot of reservations), then you will want telephone support, and you’ll want it 24 hours a day, seven days a week. If there’s a chance you could end up in this situation, only consider signing up with a Web host service that offers fulltime telephone support. It will cost more; it will be worth it.
Web Development Tools
Most Web hosting services offer some sort of Web-site development software, and some offer several choices. Generally the packages they offer are pretty easy to use.
The most useful tools for beginners are the page templates, or preformatted pages, where you just type in your company info in the appropriate spots, just like a Word template, if you’ve ever used one of those. If you’re ambitious or artistic, you can use more advanced programs that let you create your own design from scratch, or modify an existing design.
More advanced users might want to code up their own HTML, either for the whole page or for a specific component you want to incorporate. You can also use more advanced Web design and construction software such as FrontPage, which comes with many versions of Microsoft Office, and will soon be replaced by two new consumer products, Office SharePoint Designer 2007 and the easier-to-use Expression Web. Other widely used coding tools include Macromedia’s Dreamweaver, aimed at professionals and ambitious amateurs; and other commercial and free programs such as Avanquest’s Web Easy Professional. These require more commitment to learning the ins and outs of Web-page mechanics, of course. As a starting point, look to see what outside design products your hosting service supports with “extensions” that make it easier for the programs to load the completed designs directly onto your site. Just don’t let yourself get distracted so that you are spending more time than you can justify tweaking your site.
These sites are designed so that any regular business person with little or no Web training can create and run them. If you want to do more, you can hire a contract tech and a Web graphics designer. You can find such people from local resources such as CraigsList or your newspaper, or by talking to colleagues in your business, or checking with your industry or business group. Some of the Web hosting sites also have links to recommended, approved, or simply available, experts and consultants.
Lots of Email Boxes
These Web hosting sites all offer you lots of email addresses. This lets you receive company mail at an address similar to that of your Web site: http://www.mycompany.com and bobsmith@mycompany.com. You’ll be able to add individual mail boxes for your staff, and email addresses for special purposes, such as info@mycompany.com.
Web hosting services offer a widely varying number of e-mail boxes, ranging from more than enough for any typical small business, on up to enough to service a medium-sized business that supports full employment. You can take advantage of this largesse by creating specialized mail boxes, such as for special projects and contests, but you will still have a great excess of available addresses on your hands. (We think this is because it makes an impressive competitive thud on the tables comparing Web hosting services.)
Search Optimization Service
You want your business Web site to be easy to find, especially you want it to show up well on search results pages of Google and Yahoo and AOL.
Some Web hosting services offer a “search optimization” service that will identify you and your type of business and the search terms that will find your company to the various important search engines, such as Google and Yahoo! Meanwhile, Web hosts like Yahoo! will add you to their business catalog so someone searching for a business by that route will be able find you.
Provided by AllBusiness.com
