Posts Tagged "business web hosting"

Amazon Web Space

Posted in Special Web Space

Choosing where to buy web space can be a challenge. With hundreds of companies offering these services, you may find yourself feeling overwhelmed. However, if you have specific needs that can’t be met by regular web hosting, you may want to look into Amazon Web Services.

When you have a business website or web application that needs higher-level resources or particular services, Amazon is a good option for you. Amazon offers a variety of different packages for specific needs.

Amazon CloudFront helps you avoid the messy files and folders, unused paid space, and slow content serving that’s common among dedicated servers.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud.

Amazon Simple Storage Service or Amazon S3 provides a simple and affordable web service which allows you to save and load any amount of data from anywhere and at any time.

Amazon SimpleDB provides the core database functions of data indexing and querying.

Amazon Simple Queue Service provides a high-performance secure queuing system, allowing you to reliably distribute work between your application processes with no inconvenience.

Are these web services right for you? You first have to determine the complexity of your website and your requirements. Shared web hosting is enough for most needs, but if you’re running a web application or a high-traffic website, you could definitely benefit from these Amazon Web Services. All in all, Amazon web space is a great option for businesses and companies who need more than the basic resources.

Small Business Web Hosting

Posted in Special Web Space

So you’ve decided to launch a website for your small business. Congratulations! A website will increase visibility, attract customers, and help your business grow. But before any of that happens, you have to buy web hosting.

You may be tempted to get the most feature-rich package you can find. Don’t sign up just yet! Generally, the more features a web hosting plan has, the more expensive it is. And you want to find the best value for your money, right? The good thing is that you are likely to need fewer features than large businesses. So it won’t be too hard for you to find an affordable small business web hosting plan to suit your needs.

So what do you need to consider when buying small business web hosting? The technical platform is a given. Without that, everything else is useless. But given that the web hosting is functional, here’s what you should look out for:

• Web applications. Do you need any special software to run your website? Examples are content management systems, blogs, shopping carts, and photo galleries. Many web hosts bundle Fantastico, which allows you to install various web applications with a few clicks.
• Design and building tools. Generally, it’s a good idea to hire a professional web designer for best results. But if that’s not in your budget just yet, and you want to create the website yourself for now, make sure that your web host has bundled tools for the task. Website builders, design templates, and content management systems are available at many web hosts.
• Speed and uptime. Check your potential web host’s data center and see whether it has high-speed Internet connections. Also, try to go with a web host that has at least 99% uptime.
• Customer support. If something goes wrong with your website, you want to get a hold of someone to fix it immediately. After all, every minute it’s malfunctioning, you could lose potential customers and therefore lose potential profit. It’s best to look for a web host that offers 24-hour support so they can get back to you as soon as possible.
• Reputation. You can tell a web host’s reputation in two ways. First, check their website for awards, testimonials, and seals of approval. Second, check out online reviews. Note that no web host is perfect, and that a few bad reviews are unavoidable. But the good should definitely outnumber the bad.

Keep these five things in mind, and you’ll get the best small business web hosting there is. But if you want your web hosting quick and you have no time to do extensive research (you’re a small business owner, after all!), just check out our list of recommended web hosts. They work great for small businesses, and they pass all the tests with flying colors.