What kind of hosting should I consider, for a business website?

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I have created this website to help web users find web hosting services in the U.K. If you are looking for web hosting services in the United Kingdom (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland), make sure you enquire about the price, bandwidth allowance, website references and support issues. Once you have signed up, you are required to pay a monthly fee whether you are using their services or not. You may want to switch to another UK web hosting company if you are not satisfied with the host you that you have chosen, but switching to another host can be time-consuming and costly. Be extra careful when signing up with any host.

Host Links: Xilo.net, Hostway.co.uk, CIHost.com, Superbhosting & Fast2Host.com

What kind of hosting should I consider, for a business website?

There are few basic requirements to help you decide what kind of servers and functionality you should look for when choosing a hosting plans. Never host your business website on a free hosting service plan. This is because most free services hosting plans requires you to place their banners or text link advertisement on your web page, which is generally not part of your business plan.

Your number one objective in choosing the right host and the right hosting plan for your business is to ensure web users on the internet can access your website at anytime they want without sacrificing overall speed and the security of your website. At the same time, you also want to maximize the functionalities provided in the hosting plans so that you can conveniently use these tools to improve your website performance. This first objective alone will allow you to demonstrate your business commitment to your web users and empower these users at all levels to freely access and act upon website-information on your site.

Secondly, choose a hosting plan based on the amount of data you want placed on the web and the estimated number of web users that will be visiting your site as it grows.

Below are some hosting advice and suggestions for web users who are looking for new hosts according to their website requirements.

Basic Website Hosting Plan

Monthly Fee
From £4.95 to £9.95 for a basic website that provides web users with information about your business or your topic of interest.

Storage Space
From 100 MB to 200MB

Bandwidth
From 3000 MB to 5000 MB
Simply put, bandwidth and data transfer are synonymous, referring to the amount of data sent to and from visitors and your website. It is calculated by the size of your web page and includes all scripting and images on a page. For example, if you have a page totaling 20KB in file size, then when a visitor loads that page on their browser, they are receiving 20KB of data.

This means to calculate bandwidth, you need to consider a) the size of your pages (or website)
b) the number of visitors to your website
c) the kind of files you offer your visitors.

Most personal websites have only a small amount of data transfer, as their websites are small in file size and they do not have a lot of visitors. Business and professional sites are larger with more visitors and therefore use more data transfer.

For example, if 1,000 visitors viewed every page on the abccompany.co.uk, the total data transfer would be 2 GB (1,000 x 2 MB = 2,000 MB) or a single 10 KB file could be viewed 200,000 times and the data transfer would be 2 GB. Most professional level websites will use less than 2 GB bandwidth per month.

Domain Pointers
Ensure that your host provides you with at least a domain pointer free of charge. In the future, you may think of a certain domain that you like. You can purchase it and point it to this current website. In other words, if you purchase a new domain, for example, abccompany.co.uk, you can point it to your current domain name, yourcompany.co.uk . That way, you can access your website using both domain names. However, you have to be aware of the consequences that can affect your web page ranking on certain search engines.

FTP Accounts
A minimum of 2 FTP accounts is recommended. If the hosting company only provides you with one FTP account, request for an extra FTP account.

Email Accounts
A minimum of 5 email accounts is recommended. This way you can create emails for your staff or to manage your incoming emails. For example ( sales@yourcompany.co.uk, support@yourcompany.co.uk , yourname@yourcompany.co.uk, yourstaffname@yourcompany.co.uk and webmaster@yourcompany.co.uk )

Ecommerce Website Hosting Plan

Monthly Fee
From £9.95 to £19.95 for a website that wants to sell services and products.

Storage Space
From 200MB to 450MB

Bandwidth
From 5000 MB to 15000 MB

Ecommerce Solution

If you have a lot of products, you need to use an ecommerce solution and software to help you manage your products' data online. Many hosts have incorporated their hosting plans with ecommerce solutions to help you leverage your core business knowledge and apply it on the web. You may also install your ecommerce software on your site. Some of the popular and user-friendly shopping carts are can be found at www.phpcart.com, www.oscommerce.com, www.shopsite.com, and www.vstore.ca

Here are a few links to several ecommerce hosting plans.

http://www.hostway.co.uk/ecommerce/ecommerce.asp

http://www.lypha.com/ecommerce.shtml

http://www.apollohosting.com/e-commerce/

http://www.netcetera.co.uk/Products/E-Commerce

Database
If you are hosting on a Linux server, mostly likely the database of your choice would have to be Mysql database. If you are hosting on IIS or Microsoft Windows Server, you have the option to choose Mysql and Ms Access database. Make sure that you choose a scripting language that you are most comfortable with, so that you can synergize your productivity for your ecommerce solutions and other applications. PHP and ASP are currently the 2 the most preferred web programming language on the internet to help you add dynamic content to your website.

Email Accounts
A minimum of 10 email accounts is recommended.

Forum and Downloading Websites

Monthly Fee
From £9.95 to £19.95 for websites that want to sell services and products.

Storage Space
From 200MB to 450MB

Bandwidth
From 10000MB to 20000 MB

You need a lot of web bandwidth allowance for hosting a forum or hosting a site to allow web users download data. Be prepared to increase your bandwidth as your sites grows. If you have many web users coming to your site on a daily basis, you will eventually need to increase not just your bandwidth allowance, but your disk space as well.

Forum Bulletin
If you want to host a forum bulletin, make sure that you know how to use php scripting and mysql database. You may want to hire some web developers to help you install and customize it if you can afford it. Currently, this is the most suitable combination of programming language and database that can run a forum quickly and affordably.

There are many useful bulletin boards that you can use. Consider, www.phpbb.com, www.minibb.net, www.vbulletin.com, www.phpforumpro.com and www.cutephp.com

Inform your host
Inform your host that you be will using this site to allow web users download data. This is because many hosts terminate hosting accounts that unexpectedly use huge amount of data and you do not want that to happen. This will ensure that your site remains online even though your account has exceeded your bandwidth allowance. Negotiate with your host about the bandwidth allowance. Sometimes you can cut cost if you place their banners on your site.

Email Accounts
At least 10 email accounts are recommended for moderators and your staff to manage the different responsibilities of your website.

Virtual Private Server and Dedicated Server

Monthly Fee
Dedicated servers cost from £99.00 to £200.00

Virtual Private Servers cost from £30.00 to £80.00

Storage Space
From 10GB to 20GB

Bandwidth
From 50,000MB to 100000MB

Why VPS or Dedicated Server?
When your website eventually grows to accommodate many web users on a daily basis, you need a server that will serve your site only. This is because your website will gradually load slowly as more web users go to your site and the server performance will decreases as well. You do not want this bad experience to happen on your web users. Hence, a dedicated server or a virtual private server is the next phase of hosting to improve your website speed and performance.

When you host your site on a dedicated server, all the resources on the server are yours. The server will serve your site only and no other web accounts or websites will be utilising your server except your site.

If you have a limited budget, consider a virtual private server to gain greater control and performance. A virtual private server utilizes a software platform that permits a hosting vendor to use a single dedicated server as multiple virtual machines. It allows multiple customers to share the expense of hardware and network connections, without sacrificing privacy, performance or preference. VPS is therefore considered one of the most sophisticated modes of automation available for provisioning small to mid-sized business web hosting

Email Accounts
A minimum of 50 email accounts is recommended for moderators, staff, affiliates, and personal use.

Research-Hosting's Site Partners
Dedicated server Xilo.net LunarPages Inventio UK Website Tools

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