I live in a fairly small town, about 20,000 people in the city limits. Suffice to say, most of the small businesses in town don’t have a website. Forget search engine marketing, heck some are still on dialup.
But such is life (not) in the big city. If for some odd reason, a local business actually decides that they need a website, they still have no idea the few purchases (domain, hosting & web designer) that they need to make just to get that site up and running. Web hosting is the most foreign of the three to the average business owner.
So today I’m going to help Mister Joe Average out there who’s running a business selling appliance parts or running a local drywall company.
Web Hosting Defined: A service that allows users to post web pages to the Internet. A web host, which is also called hosting service provider (HSP), is a business that provides the technologies and services needed for websites to be viewed on the web.
Basically, web hosting is the virtual real-estate that you lease which you build your website upon. You rent out a portion of a hard drive on a server that is connected to the Internet.
So how do you go about picking out a web host? There are tons of them out there. Some are professionally driven, and some are run by a 15 year old high-schooler. Here are some quick and easy ways to pick out a good host.
Pre-tips Tip: This may be a personal bias, but if you’re planning on marketing your site, I suggest you stay away from Windows-based hosting. The options with Linux servers are much better, and there are plenty of them out there, don’t be at a disadvantage right from the get-go.
