• Section: Money Guide - Category: Online Business
• Written by Paul Buntrage

* Looking for the best hosting provider for your business can be overwhelming in the least. Any wrong choice or hasty decision could result in lost sales and revenue leading to heart-ache in an ever competitive market. Thus, the first and most important question arises: What type of hosting do you need?

For business purposes, free hosting is usually ill-advised. It can be unreliable and slow. Many free hosts also bog down your website with advertisements which would detract from your business.

Shared hosting services, on the other hand, may be effective for some small and medium sized businesses. Even some larger enterprises can do well on a feature rich shared hosting plan. Shared hosting may be an affordable way to get your website online; but at times your website may run slower than you desire as there will be multiple websites on one server.

Collocated hosting is where the business buys its own server. The hosting provider will then maintain t

he network but nothing else. You will need to hire or outsource for someone to maintain the server and take care of any problems that arise. This adds an even greater expense, but the hosting experience is usually reliable and secure.

Dedicated hosting is a cheaper option. Think of it as leasing a server from a website. Your website and yours alone will be on this server. There is unmanaged dedicated hosting which comes with limited support, or managed hosting in which your hosting provider will now provide extensive technical support, maintenance and management of your server. With dedicated hosting you can depend on high levels of reliability and security.

* What is the 'uptime'? For a business website the highest possible uptime is critical. Do not even consider a host that can not guarantee an uptime of at least 99%. Ask the host if they keep tabs on their server uptimes. A particularly good web host should do so. If they monitor their servers properly they can quickly identify and solve problems. It is also a way for you to learn how reliable their services really are. You do not want to be paying for hosting only to find that your website is often offline.

* How much bandwidth is on offer? You do not want to select a plan with too little bandwidth for your website. On the other hand, you do not want to pay for an abundance of bandwidth that you do not need or will never use.
The amount of bandwidth will essentially tell you how much data can pass through the network during the month. The more bandwidth you have with a hosting package, the more website traffic your website is able to receive and handle each and every month. It may also be worth considering an 'additional bandwidth' option. This will give you some leeway on months when your website has even more traffic than usual. Having some extra bandwidth will help you to avoid having to pay overage fees in any given month.

Estimate how much bandwidth you will need before you start shopping for hosting. For example, multiply your estimated number of visitors X page size X expected number of views X 30 days. If your website offers downloads, factor this in too, as well as your own uploads and emails.

* What are the additional features available? E-Commerce is perhaps the most important for an online business. By using ecommerce hosting, you can easily sell products and services online without the need for any extensive technical knowledge.

An SSL certificate is an essential ecommerce feature. It is a method of protecting your customers' private information. You do not want the possibility of their personal data or payment information to be accessed by anyone else on the Internet. By protecting your clients and offering them a secure ordering process, customers will be much more inclined to buy from you.

Some web hosts will provide ecommerce packages that can be customized. You can select the features that you need for the website (shopping cart, website statistics, secure logins, email accounts, etc.) In doing so you can increase t

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