How to obtain small business web hosting
The rising trend of Internet shopping and emergence of smart phones has made it indispensable for SMBs to have a strong online presence. Individuals seldom use phone books to search about information related to businesses; nevertheless they certainly look for commercial websites. In fact, they typically look for the online presence of the business as a symbol of reliability and credibility of the organization.
In case you have just started up with your business venture and thinking of coming up with your own first website, then according to your budget you should take the right decision. Simply put, either you can look for a highly skilled web programmer who can build your website or you can even think of going ahead with shared hosting. This is another ideal option that SMBs can leverage from.
Let’s discuss in details what exactly is shared web hosting and how SMBs can make most of shared hosting.
What is shared web hosting?
Shared hosting can be defined as utilizing the services offered by the host, and possibly a setup, wherein you have to share sever space with other businesses. There are many corporations in the web hosting marketplace, thus you must do some evaluation based on services provided by the vendor, price and reviews of their existing clients.
Here are some of the key steps that you need to consider before choosing shared web hosting services for your business:
1. First and foremost thing that you need to do is to meet with your marketing team so as to discuss your budget and what attributes of hosting that your website will require. For instance, your website should comprise of a home page, contact page and technical support service page; nevertheless, at times some business do require email addresses, online shopping carts, web analytics and blogs integration. Hence, try to first create a list of each and everything that you want to include in your website before speaking to your vendor. This ways you will be prepared beforehand as you will have the listed parameters in your mind.
(i) Significantly, consider integrating a page for articles or blogs in your website. These attributes assist you to increase your ranking on Google and other organic search engines. However, only consider blog integration if you have a dedicated team to regularly manage and update it.
(ii) Always make sure that your website should have a contact us page. As this will help you getting higher ranking over search engines, since it facilitates them with the desired information, such as your location or phone number.
2. Secondly, think prudently as how much control you want to have over your website. Shared hosting solutions are actually quite different particularly when it comes to how effortlessly you can carry out the desired changes in your website. In case, you have to update products often, then you should look for something that gives you comprehensive control over your website server, but if you are service-centric vendor then you may not require that much extensive control.
3. Another thing that you can do is that ask your business associates or partners about the web hosting services they are using and how beneficial it had been for them. This ways you can get a clear picture about the service providers and will help you in taking the right decision.
4. Try to do the relevant in-depth search about the services available simply by using the keywords, such as cheap web hosting, best web hosting, web hosting services, and small business web hosting services. Then, make a list of all the web hosting vendors along with the services they are offering. This segregation will definitely help you in deciding which service will match your business requirement.
5. Once you have decided about which web hosting services you will go for as well as the service provider, try to get in touch with their online representatives. Ask them about the services they are offering and how they are different from other services providers.
(i) Try to visit their data center, if it is possible. Moreover, ensure they have high-speed bandwidth, so that your website remains up and running. Apart from this, look for the percentage of “up time” is around 99.95%.
(ii) Another crucial aspect that you must not overlook is that the company should offer 24X7 technical support services. This is very important aspect since any time your site faces any issue due to unexpected reasons you can at least get in touch with the team and get your issue resolved immediately rather looking for help somewhere else.
