The Internet Business is a business model that can be started with a minimum of investment. Your work, talent and favourable circumstances can be enough to help you start an Internet business.
If you already have an idea and you planned everything about your product and site’s content you need to start your business. At first you need to minimize the costs and investments in order to diminish risks. If the business will not take off as expected the loss will be minimal and you can try another idea. Read this article about successful business ideas.
The minimum for an Internet business is a domain name, (this is not 100% required but strongly recommended) and a Web Server. A web server can be your own equipment or hosted server. Hosting companies will sell various types of hosting services ranging from a dedicated server with one or more dedicated IP addresses to shared hardware.
A good web hosting package will contain support for application development platforms such as PHP, ASP, ColdFusion, etc… access to a database server and a Control Panel that offers to customers an easy way to manage their website.
As a starter the minimal package will be perfect for you, you can always switch to a dedicated server if shared services can’t accommodate your growing traffic.
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When you choose your first web hosting look these features even if you don’t think you are going to need them; as your business grows you will certainly need it.
- Disk space – this should not be a problem, as most of the companies will give you plenty of space or even unlimited space.
- Technical support – you need good technical support that you can rely on if something happens. 24/7 support is desired so you don’t have to wait the next day to fix your website.
- Email support, auto-responders, mail forwarding will be great marketing tools.
- FTP is a definite requirement, SSH connection could be needed, Control Panel is an excellent tool for administration you should choose a package that provides it.
- Multiple domains and sub-domains will help you pay for a minimal single package while testing various domain names.
- Up-time is a measure of reliability of a web site. 99.5% or more is a good up-time.
- Web-site speed – can be determined by a series of factors of which the important ones when picking your hosting company are: the Internet Connection Speed of your host, the number of customers that share a server, the resources taken by the other customers that share the server with your web-site, the capability to partition hardware so that CPU and IO are equally shared between customers, (some companies use a CPU throttling mechanism).
- Support to database, PHP, ASP or ColdFusion and Perl.
- Price is very important, at least at this stage, but don’t go for the cheapes just because of the price. All the previous aspects are more important.
- Try to go local, the language barrier, the time-zone sometimes make a difference. Also it will be faster for your clients to access a local provider than a server located on another continent.
It is important that you focus more on the content of the website and running the business and not on developing the website and learning PHP or ASP. That’s why you have to look for a Control Panel that contains the ability to install a CMS, (Content Management System), such as Drupal or Joomla or even WordPress.
Following is a list with some of the most popular Web Hosting providers:
HOSTMONSTER – The best Web Hosting
Host Gator
Blue Host – Best Web Hosting Plan! 300 GB Space, 3,000 GB Bandwidth – only $6.95/mo!
Go Daddy – $1.99 Web Hosting
Host your Web site with FatCow!
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IX Webhosting Top Ranked MS SQL, MySQL, PostGreSQL WebHosting – Linux/Windows
Just Host hosting for $4.95/mo, Unlimited disk space and bandwidth plus FREE domain
Save 20% on Web.com web creation/web hosting products using code TWC287
Business VPS – Virtual Server Hosting from Myhosting.com
iPower Dedicated Servers
1&1 Internet Ltd – UK
iPage – $83 Plan for only $3.50 a month – Click Here for More Details!
Get everything you need for a great web site with Yahoo! Web Hosting – 25% off
Aplus.Net – Special offer: Business hosting from $4.98!
Lunarpages.com – Get a website from $4.95/month + Unlimited Emails, Storage & $700 Free Bonus Software – Limited Time Offer!
