Small Business Web Hosting
Like most small business owners, you're probably looking for reliable web hosting that is also affordable. There are a number of factors to consider when choosing a web hosting solution for your small business. This small web site explains some of these factors and provides some recommendations to consider. We've been involved in building and hosting websites for 10 years now, we understand how things work, and with a little background reading you can too.Price vs Performance
10 years ago (mid 1990's) it was fairly typical for a small business to host their site with a local internet service provider or ISP (That is -- the few small business that had sites, or "home pages" as they were often called then). Flakey service was the name of the game, and costs were high (relatively speaking) as well. In those days one often paid $50/m or more for service that was down for a number of hours each week.Times have changed considerably, and one can now expect much higher service levels for a lot less money. For $10/m you can expect service that functions reliably, save maintenance time of a few hours per month. If you pay a premium (like $50-100/m) you can expect down-time (that is, time when your website is unavailable) in the minutes or seconds per month. You'll also find that by not going with "the lowest of the low-end" you'll typically get much better technical support.
That may seem like a big difference, and for some very small or home based businesses it can be. However, if you run a small business with even modest expenses, you have to begin to evaluate how important your website is to your overall business strategy, and how much its being unavailable will hurt your bottom line. For example, if that hot prospect "just happens" to visit your website, after being convinced by that glossy brochure (which cost you money to have designed and printed), and finds "page not found" because your discount $4.95/m web host broke the server again, you may have just lost that lead.
There are a number of factors that affect which small business web hosting provider is right for you. A couple of the more important considerations are email reliability (unless you run your own email servers or use a different outsourcer) and web hosting features. Articles on our site outline some considerations in each of these categories.