Start Your Busines Online Right, The Cheap Way!

Business class hosting seems to be an overused term that appears to make a web hosting plan sound much more stout.  However, if you are going to run a site you definitely want a web hosting plan that is going to adhere to your needs.  Furthermore, you need to make sure they are using the latest hardware and can withstand high volumes of traffic in a small amount of time.  However, you do not want to spend a small fortune in order to get the job done.

In this article you will get the answers to these questions?
    •    What should a web hosting package offer for small businesses?
    •    What type of hosting package do I need for my small business?
    •    Applications needed to run a business website?
    •    How to save money on starting a website?

First, let me start off by saying not every package is going to adhere to your needs.  In order to run your site without any downtime you need the right amount of resources without overspending your money.  True, you could overkill your website with resources and the latest hardware, but do you really want to toss your hard earned money down the drain?  Commonly, when business owners purchase hosting they tend to lean towards the bare minimum that will satisfy their needs.  As your business grows your hosting plan can simply grow with your business.

So what plan should you start with?  Well typically hosting providers tend to offer three different kinds of hosting plans, shared, VPS (virtual private server), and dedicated hosting.  Before I go on I just want to stress that dedicated should be out of the question if you are completely new to running a website.  VPS probably won't be your best bet, either.  Shared is the bottom line hosting, which is exactly what it's name suggest.  Typically for under $10 a month will have an allotted amount of space on a server, which is shared with a couple dozen websites to hundreds of sites depending on the limit the shared provider limits on their server.

This can be a safe way to go as it is rather cheap and you get more than enough, space, bandwidth, and customer support you should need to run your small business.  Some of the drawbacks to shared hosting is you can compromise your security if your site is hosting with other sites which are frequently hacked, due to server side hacks.  Another drawback or limitation is shared servers can be frequently bogged down due to high surges of visitors in a short amount of time.  This is bad because it can deem your site "down" for an extended amount of time.

If you are a small business or trying to get some kind of online presence I would highly recommend using a shared hosting plan as they are the bare minimum and will do everything needed to get your site up in running.  I know I just stated all the drawbacks of shared just a second ago, but you can always migrate to VPS at a later date.  Typically when I start sites I will always develop it on a shared server and once my traffic is increasing and I notice that I am getting larger and generating a decent amount of income I will go with VPS. It is typically about 3-5 times a much per month.

As far as applications go for your website you really don't need anything except maybe Creative Suite CS4 which is going to be bundled with everything from Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, ect.  However, a more logical approach would be "a" hire someone to develop your site and maintain it or "b" use one of the free blogging platforms such as Wordpress.  Just because it is a Wordpress "blogging platform" doesn't mean that you need to use it as a blog.  In fact, it s a excellent CMS (content management system) that you can use to easily update your site and with a couple hours of training can easily master.

In fact, I am leaning towards installing a Wordpress CMS on a site and then spending a $100 on a dynamic theme that I can easily customize to my liking.  This could save you thousands and thousands of dollars verses hiring a web developer to create a website for you from scratch.  One of the easiest web hosting providers I always use is InMotion because they have cPanel, which contains Fantastico.  Fantastico is a great easy to install tool that allows you to install a plethora of scripts with no technical know-how at all.