Selecting A Quality Web Host

Deciding how you will get your ecommerce Web site designed can be daunting. There are several approaches available, each with different advantages and disadvantages.

Online Storefronts

If you have a small business, you may want to consider a storefront or an online mall. For a fee, these services help you design an Ecommerce Web site. These services also host your ecommerce site. These "ecommerce Web site in a box" services generally have Domain Name options that include everything you need to sell online.

Features and support vary by program and can include options such as search engine placement, credit card processing, and advertising. They tend to be template services, however, with less flexibility than a custom site. Familiarize yourself with the current offerings in this area before making a final decision.

Custom Sites

If you have an ecommerce business that is too large for or has outgrown the smaller storefront services, you may want to consider the more flexible custom site. For added cost you can have a unique site, receive greater support, and handle more traffic. You have the options of hiring the same company to design and host your site or using separate design and hosting services.

Hiring the same company to design and host your site.

This option involves the fewest logistics, but may come with trade-offs in design quality or host reliability. Be aware that designing and hosting require domains different sets of domain name and expertise. When choosing a service, evaluate their experience and ask for references in both areas. Go to sites the company has designed and navigate them. Note how the sites look, how easy they are to understand, and how quickly they load into your browser.

To evaluate the company’s ecommerce hosting capabilities, contact current customers and ask how pleased they are with the service. Find out how often the server is down and ask about help desk responsiveness. Find out what order related issues - if any - they have experienced. Also, consider how your site will be updated. Can you upload changes directly or do you have to wait for someone at the hosting company to get to it? If it is the latter, ask current customers about their experience with this process.

If you are still considering the design/hosting service after studying their design capabilities and talking to their current customers, you may also want to find out if there has been recent turnover in key personnel. An individual designer, coordinator, or account manager can make a large difference in support or design quality.

Using a separate design and hosting service.

By separating the design and hosting, you have more choices. Thus, you can have more control over both your budget and your site. Technical incompatibilities are a risk when taking this approach, however. Be sure your designer is familiar with your domain name hosting service and it's technical capabilities. To help facilitate information flow and minimize technical problems:

1. Choose a short list of hosts that offer the ecommerce capabilities you require and pass "reliability" tests. Read Don't Make These Hosting Mistakes for questions to ask and other mistakes to avoid.
2. Find a Web designer experienced in ecommerce applications.
3. Together, decide on the hosting service and ecommerce systems you will use.

Making the Decision

Deciding upon the right combination will take some research. One way to gather a list of hosting options is to first find ecommerce sites that you like and/or have ecommerce abilities similar to your needs, then ask about the sites' hosting and ecommerce providers.

Asking for referrals from business acquaintances is another. Many times, people are more than happy to share their positive experiences. For example, I use five different domain name and am generally pleased with all of them. When asked about hosting, however, I always recommend Lexiconn.com (my WebSiteMarketingPlan.com site host) because of the exceptional help desk service and support documents.

Another way to discover hosting options is to look for online advertisements. You can generally find these designated as "sponsored" listings in search engines and on informational Web sites. While there is no guarantee all of the companies you find will be high-quality, the willingness to pay for advertisements can be an indication of commitment.

Diligently decide upon your required ecommerce features, then choose a host with those features in mind. By doing so, you are creating a smoother path to ecommerce success.

Things You Need To Know When Changing Your Web Host

Changing from one web host to another can become necessary if your website becomes popular and your current host can't meet your needs for bandwidth, storage, etc. This can be especially true if your site is hosted on a free web host.

If a move become necessary, be sure to plan domain names carefully. The first step is to decide on a new hosting company, of course.

Once you have found a host that can meet all your needs, you need to move your site on to the new server. Before making any moves, be sure to back up your website from the old host.

If your website isn't well structured and has been growing haphazardly, this is a good time to consider redesigning things. That could simply mean a new page design or it could mean redesigning your database and content storage.

For the first 48 hours after moving to a new host, you should use a redirect page on your old site, that automatically forwards people to the new one. This will ensure that your visitors will see the new site, even if its IP address hasn't propogated yet.

It takes about 48 hours for a new website to get listed on most domain names across the internet, so after that you should be fine.

A few more suggestions for an easy transition include:

1. Find out whether your new host is running on Unix or Windows and make sure it will be compatible with everything you're moving from the old host.

2. Check to see how much storage you need domain names for all your files and content on your current site, and make sure you get enough on the new host to give you room to grow.

3. Check to see what services your new host offers, and make sure anything you have been using on your current host (like autoresponders, mail forwarding, etc.) is available.

4. If your current website is created using Microsoft Frontpage, make sure your new host supports Frontpage extensions.

5. Check to see what your new host's policy is for extra bandwidth, in case your site continues to get busier.

6. If the new host's server is a shared server, check to make sure there are no adult sites hosted on the same system. They can get busy and cause all the other sites on the same server to slow down.

7. Check the review sites and forums for customer feedback about your new host before signing up. These are good indicators of the level of service you can expect.

Once you have your data uploaded to your new host, test your site to make sure it's working properly. You should be able to preview your site before you fully switch your domain names to the new address.

Free Website Hosting Vs Paid Website Hosting Basics

Web site hosting service companies on the Internet permit the user to make their web site accessible through the World Wide Web. There are huge numbers of companies that offer web space on their server for their customers and also offer Internet connectivity in general in a data center. There can be various types of web site hosting companies. The main classification is the free web site hosting and the paid web site hosting service companies.

In case of free web site hosting, the user has Domain Names the right to upload his or her web site content on the server space that is provided by the domain hosting without any cost. This type of web site hosting service is great for people who are new to to internet and plan to get familiar with web site creation and functionality of web servers. On the other hand, to get your web site uploaded on a web space that is provided by a paid web site hosting company, you need to pay the company periodic fees. The fee amount may vary from company to company. The paid web site hosting companies are best suited for professional web site owners. People who need large web space to upload their web sites and who expect a certain amount of web site visitors which is restricted on free hosting accounts to a minimum.

The revenue that the paid web hosting service companies get is through the fee that is paid to the company by the web site owners. In case of free web site hosting companies, the main source of income are the ads and banners that can be placed on their clients web pages.

The main advantage of using a free web site hosting service is that they are free of cost and hence make a perfect choice for people who Godaddy are new into the business and are just looking to start out. They are perfect for people who just want to display a minimum content on the World Wide Web in small amount of web space. The other advantage of using the free web site hosting service is that most of these companies provide integrated, easy tools to upload the pages on to the hosting account. They do this realizing the fact that the free web site hosting services are generally utilized by the newbies.

There are also certain disadvantages of using the free web site hosting services. When using the free web site hosting service, you are forced to place the ads and Domain Names banners by the web site hosting company on your web pages. Also the revenue that is obtained by the ads goes to the web site company. In case of paid web site hosting service, ads and banners placed on your web site are Domain Names according to your will and the revenue of the banners and ads placed on your web site goes in your pocket. Also in some case of free web site hosting, the domain name of your web site starts with the web site hosting company name followed by your web site name. This is not the case of paid web site hosting service. You get a unique web site domain. The web space provided by free web site hosting service is limited whereas in case of paid web site hosting service you can buy the web space according to your requirements.