Knowing what to look for when looking for small business web hosting can greatly help your chances of success in your online business. In the fast-paced world of business, there are many ways to advertise your company. Arguably the biggest way to increase sales in a cost effective manner is by having an online presence. Having a corporate or business web site both to provide information to existing clients, and to attract more potential customers by way of the search engines is essential nowadays to survival of businesses in competitive fields. Moreover, knowing the type of web hosting for small business you need will help you greatly down the road in terms of hidden costs and overhead, site loading speed and features.

Since your web site is your first contact with visitors on the internet, it is imperative that your ecommerce web site hosting provides the following:

High server uptime, at least 99%% overall uptime on average.

PHP support (the newest stable version)

MySQL databases. Most businesses will require at least 3-4 if not more, so your host should provide at least this many with any web hosting package.

CGI

Over 50 POP email accounts

Webmail (in case you do not wish to use a client side email program)

Sufficient bandwidth. 20 GB is sufficient for most small business, and this amount should be increased in relation to the amount of traffic you receive.

Sufficient space. Very few companies realistically use more than 1 GB of web space.

Customer support ticket system with reasonable response time – less than 4 hours

Nightly backups to tape with diesel or similar backup power source.

Cpanel, to allow for easier setup of email, scripts and administration.

Support for basic MIME types including Macromedia flash.

Beneficial features:

Fantastico Cpanel. This program is loaded for scripts which al help the success of the modern businessman. Fantastico incorporates webblogs, eccomerce shopping carts, and content management systems all into a very easy-to-use interface. Subdomain support.

Zend PHP optimizer to assist in programming and access speeds.

Always do your research before committing to a web host. There are many websites setup as web hosting review sites which claim to be unbiased, and in actual fact, send business to their own company. Test your hosting for a period of two months to see if the site is accessible all of the time, and if the load times are fast.

Todd is server administrator and owner of GDO Web Hosting, in operation serving thousands of clients since 1999.

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