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The second consideration is 'Bandwidth'. This is amount of information (in form of web pages and images you build your website with) that server will send to people visiting your website. You see, each time a website is visited, person looking at it is actually downloading to their browser (as opposed to ‘downloading to disk’) that is, they are being sent all information that makes up web page being viewed. This all adds up to bandwidth and in a hosting plan it is referred to in Gigabytes (1 Gb =1000 Mb) per month. Starting out, you will find 5 - 10Gb per month absolutely plenty. You can generally update or increase these limits easily and cheaply.
Other considerations regarding needs of your home business website are more complex and involve things like how many email accounts you can have, as you will no longer need to rely on your ISP email or free accounts with MSN or Yahoo etc. You will have your own domain and will have email addresses which you will name, like 'me@mydomain.biz. This is far more impressive and professional than 'dime a dozen' free email accounts that everyone has.
Other facilities you may have or want available for your home based business website are Guestbooks, Forums, Databases, SSL (secure socket layer), Shopping Cart, FrontpageÒ Extensions (allowing you to use popular MicrosoftÒ website building and editing program FrontpageÒ). There are so many options, most of which you may not understand or need at all, ever, but some you will.
One specific option which a home business website, especially Affiliate related, should have available is ability to create FREE and either unlimited or numerous 'Sub-Domains'. This facility allows you to create mini websites (although they may not be so small) within you main Domain. For instance, if your domain name is a 'generic' name like www.online-plus.biz and you are marketing brooms, you can create a separate website with a URL, which will look like this www.brooms.online-plus.biz . You can do this as many times as you are allowed sub-domains and it is extremely handy and cost saving for Affiliates and those who wish to 'diversify' but not have to get a new domain for every product. This is why it is wise to choose a domain name which is 'generic', which means it has no specific meaning and can be combined with anything and not look out of place. For instance, if you choose www.brooms.biz, then you can hardly use it in a website which deals with Viagra!! (www.viagra.brooms.biz ??? ). Although, there are some strange looking domain names out there??!!
Stephen Brennan runs the 'Home Based Business and Affiliate Center' - http://www.online-plus.biz, is publisher of 'Home Based Biz' newsletter and is the author of 'The Affiliate Guide Book' - The Definitive guide to becoming a successful Internet Affiliate (at little or no cost) - available at http://www.ebooks.online-plus.biz