Why Should My Business Develop a Website?

• A website will allow you to provide basic information that establishes your company’s legitimacy in that having your own company domain reinforces your legitimacy as a serious business professional. Apparently approximately 70% of those who use internet also shop online.
• If you have a physical address a website comes in handy when potential customers are looking for your location. Providing a map on your site will help these customers find you.
• More and more people use internet to shop around and compare prices. This is an excellent opportunity for you to list your products and services along with their pricing.
• Just about every small business has limited office hours. The internet never sleeps and neither will your website. This gives you opportunity to be “open” 24 hours a day.
• A website will allow you to update your information as frequently or infrequently as you choose.
• A website can reach both your local market and world market. There are no boundaries online thus enabling you to do business across globe.

Good Web Hosting – What is it?

With hundreds of web hosting companies to choose from today it can be hard to know which ones are actually worth using. Below is a guide of things to look for in a web host:

Services - A lot of times we are sold on idea that bigger is better. I like to look at web hosting companies with a quality over quantity perspective. If lets say you need a site to just simply host your little guy’s minor league soccer team, do you really need a terabyte of bandwidth? Are you ever going to make use of all of those gigabytes of storage space. A lot of webhosting companies will oversell their servers in this way, and rely on little sites that won’t reach their limits to keep things running. These companies are spreading themselves thin, and I wouldn’t recommend getting on board with one of them. Find a host that is going to meet your sites current needs, and that also allows room for growth.

Prices - I’ve seen small packages go for expensive sums, and large packages go for very cheap. This goes back to point above, and also point below. Make sure that you are actually getting what you pay for! Getting more than you pay for isn’t normally a good thing, as chances are you aren’t with a top quality host as they recognize that to keep things running they need to charge more. Another way in which Web Hosting companies will often cut costs is in their Customer Service. Most hosting companies online are simply reseller services, and can have terrible response times and customer support, as they are over extended or simply don’t care.