Web Hosting Options for Small Business

It seems that so many times it is hard for the little guy to get a leg up in the business world. Every supplier or service that you talk to is only interested in catching the bigger fish and is totally disinterested in you. When it comes to finding a web host for your website it can often times be no different sometimes. Sure they have service plans that you can cut costs with but how do you know just what you need to get by.

There are a few simple rules to follow if you are in the market for a budget web hosting plan that at the same time doesn’t leave you empty handed on the essential services that you will be needing from time to time. If your website is less than one-hundred pages and doesn’t have any data intensive components such as streaming videos than you can get by with the bare minimum amount of bandwidth and gigabytes of memory and that means a basic plan for about $5.

If you have more than one-hundred pages and or your pages are heavily laden with text and photos then you may want to take the option of shared web hosting for about $10 which is going to give you more bandwidth and memory. That is what you will need for the bare bones basic web hosting service if that is all that you need. You have to bear in mind though that what you are going to be doing with your website also has to be considered.

For instance; if your site is just for reference purposes that is supporting a non Internet business in your community then you can still get by with the low cost basic web hosting service. If however your business is an Internet business that changes the picture considerably. This is because, unless you are marketing a product that only you have and no one can live without, you will be in competition of untold numbers of other people on the Internet.

This then means that you are going to have to engage in some level of website promotion or SEO which stands for search engine optimization. If you don’t, then every time that someone types in the keywords to look for what ever it is that your website is selling you will be the last in line with regards to prospective sellers.

SEO can be aproached two diffferent ways with reqards to a prospective web hosting service. The first way is to just pay them to promote your website and do the SEO for you but it is going to cost you.

The second way is to learn about SEO and then do it yourself. If you are going to do it yourself you will need to learn what basic tools you will be needing your web hosting service to have available. SEO is not overly complex but you do have to know what you are doing or all of your best efforts can be a waste of time.

Ecommerce Web Hosting Shopping Cart Options

Don?t be fooled by the name. Today?s shopping carts allow customers to do far more than select and purchase items. When signing up with a web host, you will more than likely have a number of different shopping cart applications to choose from. Some of the programs you might encounter are Agora, osCommerce, CubeCart and ZenCart. To help you decide which is the right program, I?ll go over each shopping cart and detail what they have to offer.

Agora

Agora is a popular shopping cart that offers design integration for templates, HTML, Perl, JavaScript and CSS. It also includes the basic features that allow you to manage products and inventory along with the ability to create unique product pages, add unlimited options for individual products, add unlimited categories and subcategories, list best selling items and display discount codes. Agora simplifies the ordering process and management tasks as you can easily generate custom order notification messages, order forms in HTML and utilize multiple payment gateways. Granting the ability to view orders by date or status and support for numerous shipping options, Agora is the preferred shopping cart for many business owners.

osCommerce

Currently serving more than 12,000 online stores and over 150,000 website owners, osCommerce is a leading shopping cart program and an ideal choice for e-commerce. What most webmasters like about this software is that it runs flawlessly on any platform be it Windows, Linux or Apple?s Mac OS X. osCommerce is a template-based system, meaning that it can easily be integrated into your website. This structure also enables the software to be updated with ease. Similar to Agora, osCommerce offers support for unlimited products, invoices, categories and subcategories. It also makes it simple to add, remove or modify any of the shopping cart features. osCommerce allows you to create newsletters, send out invoices or packaging lists and even backup your data right from the interface. This program is very secure and supports multiple payment gateways including Authorize.Net and PayPal.

CubeCart

CubeCart is a professional shopping cart program that makes a perfect solution for e-commerce. The program is completely template-based, allowing you to generate HTML content entirely independent of the PHP it?s coded in. CubeCart is a favorite of many webmasters because of its clean interface, ease of use and minimal maintenance requirements. This software offers a number of layouts and supports unlimited products, multiple countries and languages, various shipping options and tax classes and much more. With tons of self-help resources posted on the web, you will find that CubeCart is one of the easiest shopping carts to use.

ZenCart

Catering to the new webmaster, ZenCart is a popular shopping cart application that offers the customization and ease of use needed to quickly set up an online storefront. This software requires no knowledge of HTML as products can be added, deleted or modified via a simple template-based system. ZenCart supports multiple product catalogues, pricing and payment options, numerous sorting methods, customer authorization keys and more. The WYSIWYG editors enables the easy customization of your layout, making this one of the most user-friendly shopping carts around.

The best thing about all of these shopping carts is that they can be installed in one click with the Fantastico script installer. To find out which program is right for you, I recommend learning more about the level of support they offer and what other webmasters are saying about them. In the end, it is up to you to determine which shopping cart best suits your customers.

Linux Unix options for Small Businesses

Linux/Unix is an alternate type of system that provides hosting for small businesses and companies that run Linux/Unix applications on their personal computers and laptops. The Linux/Unix-based platform is stable platform in the industry.

The Linux operating system was developed by Linus Torvalds as an alternative to other operating systems. Most of its versions are free of costs. The most popular Linux software is Red Hat and Mandrake.

Linux/Unix was only for professionals until a few years ago but the situation has changed. Many ‘small businesses have switched to the Linux/Unix platform because of its open source architecture, meaning that users can structure the system to do what they want it to do.

Web host providers are specializing in Linux/Unix servers and the demand for this type of interface has grown by 40% over the last three years.  A Unix-based platform is one of the most reliable operating system that you can ever have. It has a better up time than Microsoft Operating Systems and hosting programs in Linux/Unix are more flexible. You actually can get ore from a Linux/Unix based server than other servers on the market.

Linux/Unix supports a wide variety of application languages, more than any other operating system. The most common applications of such kind include C, C++, Shell, Perl, Tcl, Python, Java and PHP.  Databases available for Unix are mSQL and mySQL. The one you choose would depend on what you plan to do on the web and the host that you choose to park your web site.

The Linux/Unix based system comes with its won web development module in some versions of Red Hat Linux that make web site creation easy as 1-2-3. FTP modules are built into the operating system to provide you with an alternative way to load the web site to the Linux/Unix host.

Linux/Unix will become a major force in the future as more small to medium businesses turn towards its hosting platform.

Free and Cheap—Web Space Options for the Thrifty At Heart

There are some good deals on the internet concerning web space and hosting but you have to look to find the best deals. You should also consider how long a provider has been in business.

Finding free web space on the Internet is simple. All you have to do is use a simple Web search (Google, AltaVista or Yahoo) and the results should bring back options for free web space. There are many individuals and businesses looking for a place to put their website without having to pay for the service. These free services can provide anywhere from 5MB to 100Mb of online web space for hosting your web site.

Free sites also come with some cool stuff, such as counters, guest books, virtual domain names, tracking logs, blogs, copy and past scripts that are usually Java code scripts and more. These additions are good for people that have little or no knowledge into building a web site.

A free service provides benefits to all people and may sound like a good idea but the goal is to do your research to see if the deals are viable or not. Free services can also bring other unwanted things that you have to deal with when you sign up for the service. Usually, you have to submit to advertising and surveys by filling out a form before you can get your free service. Be sure that you read the user agreements that come with the free services.

You can go on the cheap and don’t want advertisements running on your site, you can get a service similar to free hosting but you would have to pay a small fee to keep your web page ad-free.  Some of these providers will offer you a service for $2.95 a month with 100MB of web space if that’s all that you need, and you can always upgrade your packages.

There’s a lot of competition for your Web site hosting dollars, and you can find some pretty good deals if you look hard enough.