Finding a Small Business Web Site Hosting Solution

  Introduction - finding an appropriate small business web site hosting solution can be a bit of a challenge for small businesses, which have no experience in hosting a business web site, or dealing with hosting companies.   Web site hosting involves a lot more than the simple ability to transfer a file from a computer to some allocated web space.  Finding the right supplier which can provide the right level of skills and customer services is critical in ensuring the success of your company website.  Failure to properly evaluate the supplier and his capabilities, may result in a loss of service, inability to add functionality or even loss of data!  The following article provides a guide to business website hosting in terms of; defining needs and requirements, types of hosting, where to host, support needs and how to set up a small business web site hosting account...

  Small Business Needs and Requirements - owning and promoting a compelling company website is a necessity for struggling or aspiring small businesses.   When the website goes down, it can have a disastrous effect on lost sales and overall credibility of the business.  Yet most business owners make the common mistake of searching for free business hosting or the really cheap website hosting solution.  Penny pinching is a completely false economy when the value of a business website is so high! The basic rule of hosting is that you get what you pay for.  The most important factors to focus on, when choosing a business hosting provider, are reliability and future flexibility.  Unfortunately, most business owners do not have the time, inclination or the technical know-how, to match their business needs with that of a hosting provider.  

Before you Google a list of a thousand hosting companies ready to sell you their services, think about defining your business and IT needs and requirements, both in the short and medium term. This list needs to be generated before you 're-point' the DNS settings from the newly purchased domain name, towards a new hosting account.  This process should include objectively judging your own technical ability and deciding whether you need to employ external technical expertise to do all the nitty-gritty of the set up process for you. 

Next concentrate on what your website needs to do... Is your basic requirement a simple six-page 'brochure' website? or are you planning to host a full ecommerce shop with an interactive forum, blog and other 'difficult to set up' applications? What level of customer service will you require?... Will you need custom installation help, from 24x7 dedicated server support engineers? or will a next day email call-back suffice?  By listing out the business needs for all areas in advance, your list of possible business hosting providers will be shortened considerably. In defining your requirements, you will need to understand which operating systems and the scripts or software you may be employing.  You may need to judge how much bandwidth will be required to support your applications based on the size and predicted usage of the website. You will need to understand how many email and FTP accounts you require, whether you require support for any plan database driven applications and so on.

It's easy to sign up for hosting for a brand new website that has no traffic and limited functionality. However, try and picture the functionality of your website in three years time. Future proofing your requirements are an essential first step in eliminate providers that may restrict your future growth.

  Types of Hosting - there are various types of hosting account, which tend to fall into the following categories:-

• Free Business Web Hosting  - due to the competitive nature of the Internet Server Protocol (or ISP market), many ISPs offer free web hosting to individuals and companies.  Of course there is no such thing as a free lunch and virtually all 'free hosting comes with strings, such as having to put up with annoying pop-up advertisements, unreliable service, restrictive software capabilities, being spammed or cross sold products and services you don't want. Using a free hosting account to support a business critical website is lunacy and should not be recommended.  In particular, the inability to provide a full URL domain name demonstrates a lack of investment, lack of seriousness, credibility and lack of technical know-how, (as more Internet users become more and more savvy and suspicious of 'fly by night' websites).

• Virtual Web Hosting (Shared Hosting) - a virtual or shared business hosting account is the most common form of hosting for small businesses. The hosting company allocates a proportion of its server to an individual company, to host its website.  The server is literally shared between companies.  For smaller start-up enterprises, this option can prove cost effective and meet the short-term needs for most brochure-based websites.  However, the site is likely to go down at some point throughout the year, as the server will not be as resilient as a standalone dedicated solution (see below).  The other drawback is that the hosting companies support engineers will be dealing with multiple enquiries, from different companies, at the same time.  This means that the level and quality of support is divided equally amongst all the companies sharing and competing for the engineer's time.  Typically, a shared hosting companies uses a member only forum to log support user requests by e-mail.  This is the only structured and organised way they can deal with the increased volume of questions and user issues simultaneously. 

• Virtual Private Servers (Dedicated Hosting) - leasing or purchasing a dedicated server is the most reliable form of small business web site hosting.  Dedicated server hosting is sometimes referred to as a managed hosting service.  Its involves the user provisioning a physically separate server machine themselves, complete with a management software suite of tools to manage the server on a remote basis.  Hosting companies that provide dedicated servers are typically larger organisations that have invested a great deal of their own capital and advertise and promote their 'reliable' server solutions to the corporate market. 

• It is typical for dedicated services to be leased on an annual basis, at much higher rates than shared hosting.  For this premium, you can enjoy a high degree of customer service and reliability (underpinned using a service level agreement).  The very best companies may even offer financial penalties if they fail to deliver a certain percentage of pre-agreed uptime. Most dedicated server providers have very fast connections T3 fibre-optic connections, to provide almost unlimited bandwidth for your website visitors. It is typical that the customer is responsible for the security of customer data residing on the server. This option provides full control and flexibility to set up the system as the user pleases.  If you're considering this option, make sure you have the necessary skills to manage a server remotely.  However, some hosting companies do provide chargeable systems management services including:-

• Operating system updates

• Firewall services

• Antivirus updates

• Security audits

• Intrusion detection

• Backups and restoration

• Disaster recovery

• DNS hosting service

• Load balancing

• Database administration

  Levels of Hosting - most hosting is sold according to the number of technical features and services.  As a small business grows, its IT needs become more complex with regards to software functions and on-line support. It is probable that a higher hosting level will be required from the current provider.  For instance, adding on a database connection, implementing a forum, setting up a link directory script to allow sites to add a url, adding additional users or just purchasing additional bandwidth to speed up page loading times.  It is critical that there is a seamless upgrade path from the current level, to higher level of technical sophistication and service.  These additional 'bolt on' services should be bread-and-butter processes for reputable hosting companies.  Be sure to ask the practical steps required for potential future upgrade, so that your website does not need go through a difficult, timely and costly migration, or even taken down before being transferred to different server platform.

  Which Country to Host the Website In? - it is possible to host your business website in almost any country in the world.  The cheapest hosting packages are provided by companies based in North America.   However, there are a number of good reasons why you should host your business website in the country your company is actually based.  Firstly, the need to speak to the hosting engineers on the telephone dictates finding a business hosting company in the same time zone.  If your website goes down on Monday morning and the engineers of your hosting company are still asleep in America, you're going to get frustrated and angry.  Secondly, search engines tend to associate and rank websites with a domain specific domain name extension i.e. '.co.uk', in that particular country.  Search bots check the DNS settings (basically an Internet protocol address), of all web sites, in order to determine where it is hosted in the world. Therefore, by hosting your server in the same country as your target market, you are more likely to score a few more brownie points with search engines, (than choosing the cheap foreign option).

Lastly, take care to check that the hosting company actually owns or leases its servers from a local data centre. For instance, it is common practice for UK-based hosting resellers, to lease hosting space in the USA. So although their own website may market themselves as a 'thoroughly British company', your business website may actually end up being hosted in cheap shared data centres, based in America.  It is good practice to ensure that the hosting companies you are considering using, publish their address and telephone contact details on their own website.  Start by ringing them up to initially test their level of customer response and ask them questions regarding where their data centre is located. Don't be surprised if you get an answer service or call back system that redirects you to their website to complete a support request by email.  Be extremely wary of these types of companies that cannot deliver instant human response.

  Small Business Hosting Online Services -   finding affordable business web site hosting is a relatively straight forward exercise.  However, knowing what type of questions to ask a hosting representative regarding their customer service capability is a bit trickier.  Until a problem arises, it is difficult to know what specific questions might arise, given a particular situation.  Typically, users want to telephone the hosting company to ask questions on how to install scripts or set up a database. However, without an adequate telephone support service, using e-mails to resolve these sorts of issues is extremely slow and frustrating.  Email messaging backwards and forwards takes time, where as a commonsense telephone conversation with a specialist would identify and resolve the problem in minutes.   To judge how effective their customer service is actually is, ask a friend or business colleague who has used the business hosting company services before.  If no one is available, review their website claims carefully and test them.  Make a phone call out of hours and see what sort of response you receive.  Make sure you have a list of technical questions and judge how effectively they answer these.  Are they using a call-back model and simply logging calls in a call centre, to be passed onto an engineer for future resolution?  Sometimes dealing with a relatively small hosting company can provide refreshing direct contact with the hands-on engineer who will have first hand knowledge of individual servers and software.

  Setting Up Small Business Web Site Hosting for Beginners - for the complete novices is out there, it is very easy to be blinded by professionally produced hosting websites, packed with pictures of smiling satisfied customers and lots of ticks.  With this in mind, the first step is to complete an application form online, (once you are sure you have all the answers to your questions directly from the hosting company).  Before you do this, make sure you spend a few minutes actually bothering to read the hosts ‘Acceptable Use Policy’ and ‘Terms Of Service’ Agreements. In particular, the termination clauses and penalties for poor performance. Most business hosting companies provide instant access to their services via a control panel log in. It is usually from this area that you will be prompted to enter your credit card, to finalise the account registration process.  Do not re-point your DNS settings from domain registrar (organisations like Network Solutions), until you are fully satisfied the hosting is completely set up and working...  

Most shared hosting uses common control panel (such as Helm), which is easy to use and graphically intuitive for novices.  The main services to teas are as follows: -

• URL - allocate your new URL to the web space allocated.

• FTP - create an FTP (file transfer protocol connection) account and test using packages like SmartFTP.  Make a note of the server IP address as you will need this to access the web space from your ftp application. You will not be able to access ftp (using your domain name details) until it is re-pointed (see below).

• Email - create a pop3  e-mail account and test from Outlook or Exchange.  This may include creating a 'catch-all' account and email forwarding rules.  Beware of using common names for a catchall (such as info@yourdomain.com), as this increases the possibility that spammers will hit your new mailbox.

• File Manager - understand how to view, edit and delete files using any 'File Manager' tool provided form the control panel. Familiarise yourself with the virtual folders and directories contained on the server allocated to your web space.   These can appear confusing to first-time users, as virtual server folders appear with files that you may not be familiar with. Typically 'wwwroot' is used as the main root directory where you should be uploading your publicly available web pages.

• Security - you may wish to set up Secure Socket Layer (SSL) functionality (which will entail obtaining a special URL/ folder,  where you can point  users to an encrypted webpage).

• Statistics - set up statistics and log the URL required.  Most shared business hosting uses common statistical packages such as Awstats, Webalizer or SmarterStas.

• DNS Zones - set up the DNS zones which includes the 'MX' records (for third-party e-mail provisioning) and also the 'A' records

• Sub Domains - setup any sub-domains to cater for different geographical versions of your new website.

• Database Connectivity - set up any database connections required and any database users associated with it.

• Error Pages - the creation of custom error pages can replace the annoying blank pages, with your own custom message, and redirecting the user to an appropriate alternative.

• DNS Settings - make a note of the primary and secondary DNS settings.  You will need this this information to re-point from your domain registrar.

• Additional options - select additional options as appropriate such as: initiating asp 2.0, initiating PHP version 4.0, allowing directory browsing, use of scripts and applets.

Make sure you write down all of the usernames and passwords (of the above services) somewhere safe. Create some test HTML pages using an HTML application like Frontpage, or Dreamweaver and upload them to site, to make T

sure you have the ability to edit, delete or upload web pages.  Once you have thoroughly tested and familiarised yourself with the capabilities of the host control panel, you are ready to re-point your DNS to the new web space. This process is typically frustrating as the excitement will now have to be tempered with patience. It normally takes between 4 and 24 hours for the Internet to propagate so that the holding page of the hosting company magically appears, when your domain name is entered into any web browser. At that point you can upload your website.  One of the first things you will naturally check it's your statistics - be patient - as most server logs are updated overnight.  This means the next day you should be able to start familiarising yourself with the hosting feedback package.

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