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Selecting A Full Service Web Site Hosting Company


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Web Site Hosting Company
Quick Tip:

Many web site hosting companies provide additional applications that can help you with various aspects of running your business. These can range from online chat to shared contact management. If your prospective web hosting service provider has a demo account be sure to take a walk through their available applications.

Web Site Hosting Company
Quick Tip 2:

If you are looking for a shopping cart, be sure to demo the prospective full service web site hosting company's available carts. We recommend using a host's proprietary cart only when you have few items ( 1-100 ). Otherwise consider a 3rd party cart such as the full featured free osCommerce cart that we include in our shopping cart recommendations.

This keeps you from being tied down to one web site hosting company should you become dissatisfied.

Try our free interactive e-commerce web site service assessment tool to help determine your web site needs. OurShop Now will step you through the complete process.

 

What to look for in a full service web site hosting company

Selecting a Reliable Web Host Navigation

1. Hosting Company Types

2. Full Services Hosting Companies

3. Selecting a hosting company

How to switch web hosting companies

Web Host Company Recommendations

 This is part 2 of "Selecting a reliable web site hosting company". For part 1 click here.

There are also special considerations when switching from one web site hosting company to another. click here for those articles.

Why Select A Full Service Web Site Hosting Company?

The answer to that question is clearer when you think in terms of a successful business... both yours and the web hosting company's. Budget and free hosting companies are in the business of marketing upgrades or other items either to you or to your customers. Free hosting companies rarely allow the professional image you will need to establish credibility with your customers and their support rarely, if ever, come close to their claims. Even though there are good uses for free and discount services (like personal hobby sites), if you are looking for the lowest costs you should be sure to have the lowest expectations. As a business owner you may end up frustrated and spending more money to hire your own contract support.

Budget Web Hosting Company Longevity
We recently reviewed budget sites that were promoted on one of the popular web host bulletin boards. These sites were promoted in August 2002. Nearly half of them are currently not available. We consider our sites too important to trust to a company that is web site hosting as a loss leader.

Some budget and free web site hosting companies promote special features such as unlimited bandwidth. Be wary of any hosting company that promotes unlimited bandwidth. Bandwidth is the amount of data that gets transmited to browsers ( web pages, graphics, audio, etc ) and bandwidth costs the web hosting company money. Ask them if you will need to upgrade if you have 10 gigabytes of transfer.

Full Service Web Hosting Companies
Which brings us to full service web hosting companies. Full service web hosting companies are so competitively priced these days that there is not much reason for serious businesses to ever consider the budget hosts. We recommend that you start right out with a professional host that focuses their business on satisfying your needs rather than having you go through the lengthy learning process of transferring from one host to another. Merchants not willing to invest a little time and money to get things right may be better served by staying within the bounds of their "brick and mortar" real world storefront.

Business owners need stability in their hosting. Switching web hosting companies is not the end of the world but it is also not something you want to have to do. We want to find a hosting company whose primary business is web hosting and doesn't just host web sites to lead people into other avenues of their business. We want stability in a web hosting company so that we can focus on making our site a success.


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