Web Hosting

Supporting your online sales

Your web host or web hosting company or hosting service is the computer where your web site resides. Most hosting services have many computers in a room serving hundreds or thousands of customers like you. All the web pages you create are stored on their computers, or servers, and displayed on the Internet when requested by your visitors. Your hosting package typically includes an amount of disk storage, just like you have on your home computer, and a specified amount of bandwidth.

Bandwidth is a measure of how much information your visitors are getting from your site. If you're just getting a few visitors a day, bandwidth is probably not a problem. On the other hand if you have tens of thousands of visitors a day bandwidth becomes a problem.

Start small & Build

When you're getting started, I recommend that you get the smallest hosting package that's available. Usually, this will support a minimum of 10-20 web pages and one or more Email accounts. You can always upgrade as you expand the number of pages and the content of your site. 

Support is essential

One of the key issues with a hosting service is the level of customer support. I've been with dozens of hosting companies over the last few years and there are a few very good ones out there and a lot of, shall we say, less than excellent ones. That's not to say their hosting service is not excellent. It's just that when you have questions, that's where the excellence, or lack thereof, comes in to play.

There are lots of web hosting services available. There are so many that it can become very intimidating trying to figure out which one to use.

There are even free web hosts available. The challenge I've seen with the free services is that you don't have your own domain name abcsales.com, and/or they put ads on your site.

If you're serious about selling on the Internet, you want your own domain name AND you don't want someone else's ads on your site. In my mind, it shows a lack of commitment to your product or service and to your customers.

If you find one of the free sites that doesn't have these issues, by all means use it. Please let me know about it as well.

We offer inexpensive web hosting services as a convenience to our users through a third party. You can get excellent hosting, domain registration and email at a very reasonable cost. In addition, they provide phone support 24x7 when you have questions. Check it out!

One of the great things that you'll find here is "Design A Web Site" which lets you set up your web site through a step-by-step process and a set of templates so you don't have to learn a lot of HTML or other web site "stuff". You can have your web site up in minutes. Learn more about it here!

In addition to hosting you need a domain name. You can learn all about domain names.