Saturday, July 26, 2008

Web Hosting for Mom and Pop Shops

By Matt Hedges

The internet provides a wonderful new vista for small companies to make the most of their products and services. Using websites and other world wide web products gives mom and pop shops the ability to reach out globally and expand their markets. Small businesses are eager to take advantage of this technology, but often find themselves lost in a web of companies designed for big businesses and corporate websites. Small businesses need reasonable investment for their dollars, and often look for free or cheap services to provide their website needs. With the limitations of cash available to them, then need to choose wisely to be sure they are getting the best services for the price they can afford.

The impact of the demand for small business hosting has created a need in the web hosting service industry for more and more expansion to accommodate these small companies at economical rates. Since most small business do not have the IT staff to handle detailed installations, the host servers have begun to accommodate the needs of small companies by providing less complicated platforms.

Tips for small business web hosting

Finding a web host:

When starting out it is best to look for companies that are smaller and less established. The big, famous, award winning companies are attractive, but there is a high price for that attraction. When it comes down to it, they can't get you any more traffic than a small company can. That part is up to you no matter who you use. So look for a company that offers you great benefits at lower prices. Check carefully for some of the big business that even offer separate plans for the small business. This can be a great benefit for the mom and pop shop just starting out.

Shared web hosting:

The high cost of a dedicated service is impossible for most mom and pop shops to handle. Making use of the shared server option makes web hosting affordable for mom and pop shops. These servers allow a website to be built and loaded quickly-often as fast as 24 hours even with limited, or no knowledge of the process required. The benefits of shared servers are:

* Easy green check of software health

* Ensure network health

* Data and file loss prevention

* Central storage of data and information files

* Diminished costs

* Insured connectivity with your customer base.

Your technical requirements:

Web hosts offer disc space at certain levels for the individual price plans. Most mom and pop shops can make do with about 200Mb of storage space. A small business site does not usually need space for video storage, chat, or multiple emails. The normal space allowance for a small-scale site is 25Mb of disc space and 1 email account. 800Mb of traffic per month usually suffices the traffic and transfer needs of a small company.

The attraction of free services:

Free web hosting service is offered by many companies for the benefits of the small businesses and at time medium businesses. These web hosting services are advertisement supported and have limited functionality. Such web host provides sub domain or directory. There are web hosts who offer basic packages for low cost. However, the website owner will have to search for such a service provider as such companies are limited. If any hosting company wants to introduce itself to the World Wide Web then this can be a good option for them. Advertising, referrals and resell hostings are the three ways in which the hosting companies recoup the cost.

Web Hosting coupon codes:

Since the competition between the hosting companies has increased to a large extent, each one is trying to find out some ways for attracting customers. Web hosting companies is one such offer that is luring customers profusely. Types of coupon codes are:

* Free trail: Web host companies will offer free trials to new clients in order to bring them into their service providers. These free trial offers can help a mom and pop shop utilize the service, get started, and build traffic free before beginning to incur charges.

* Discounts: Flat discounts are attractive and often offer from $10 to $30 off the price of the hosting service. This is a temporary savings but it can help small companies achieve a web presence quickly at a reduced initial cost. This is very attractive to mom and pop shops as it allows them to save a considerable amount in startup cost.

* Flat discount: A discount of a flat fee that can vary between $10 and $30 is helpful to the small business owner. It is a very popular way for web hosting companies to get new clients and the client to save a fair amount of money in order to get their website started and growing.

* Free time: Some coupons offer additional services by the month. This can help off-set costs considerably.

* Free domain name registration- Some companies offer free domain name registration service. These services will helps in saving about $10 per annum.

Web hosting package deals:

There are many packages offered by web hosting services. They are usually reasonably priced and good deals for the small business owner. Your own Internet service provider may even offer a great deal on web hosting and packages to take advantage of at a low or even free price.

These companies are reliable and have special services and have exclusive offers for the small business companies. There are several companies which offer such services but companies offering exclusively for small businesses are limited. If the budget is small, companies can plan their websites accordingly and can effectively implement each aspects of web hosting to obtain maximum benefit. Later, when the companies grow along with the website costs, the hosting services can be upgraded accordingly.

Three of the companies that offer cheap web hosting for small businesses are:

* IX Web Hosting: This company offers outstanding uptime, mySQL, PostgreSQL and MMSQL databases plus advanced technology.

* Host Monster: This web host server offers Disk space (1500GB),bandwidth (15000GB), and the ability to host many domains.

* BlueHost; This web hosting service offers 500 GB disk space, 15000 GB bandwidth, free registration of domain name, and all necessary equipment.

The web hosts above are specifically designed for the small business. They all have features available for the large business and corporate websites that are separate from these plans. They also have coupon and discount plans available to aide in reducing the cost for small businesses.

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