Chew Valley Web

If are going to start your own small business website you need to register a domain name and choose web hosting for your site.

A web hosting company rents you server space for your website to live on. It is possible to run your own web servers but a small business usually prefers to let someone worry about server hardware and software and the complexity of email systems. Choosing a web hosting company can seem like an endless variety of options and costs, as there are many web hosting providers all trying to attract your business.

Let’s get down to basics.

• Web Space - This is the amount of actual server space that you require for the hosting of your website. Many small business sites don’t need much more than a few tens of megabytes. Unlimited space web hosting is available but there are pitfalls to taking up these hosting deals.
• Bandwidth - This is the limit to the amount of server activity or “load” you can ask from your web host. A server with a busy e-commerce site, larger database and high daily traffic can require larger amount of bandwidth. Unlimited bandwidth web hosting deals are available but a small business site with less than 100 visitors a day don’t actually need very much bandwidth.
• Email - The number of email addresses and email storage space for you domain is defined in the hosting package you choose.
• Extras - As well as web space and email, web hosting companies offer “extras” that you may require for your site such as PHP scripting, MySQL databases or other technical functions and software. If you are choosing web hosting for your first business website, you probably won’t need everything on offer but remember that as your business grows, you might need more advanced features from your web server.

Choosing a web hosting service, you should consider a few things.

• Reliability - It is difficult to tell how reliable the service of a web hosting company is. They may have a 99.97% uptime on their website but their servers can still seem to be breaking down and take an age to be sorted out.
• Support - Most cheap web hosting companies have technical support that is less than personal. This is fine if their email, online or telephone support is good but be warned. When you site is down and you can’t get hold of them it is frustrating for you and your customers.
• Speed - Cheap web hosting is provided on shared servers. This means that your site is on the same hardware as many other websites. Try to find out about “overselling”. Some web hosting providers “oversell” more server capacity that they have and hope that all of that capacity is not used all at the same time. This can be a problem with unlimited hosting deals, as sites with theoretically unlimited server capacity can use up a lot of resources at the expense of your website.

To choose the best web hosting for your business site see if you can find a provider that someone you trust recommends. You get what you pay for but there are not all the best web hosting is expensive.

Chew Valley Web uses top quality, reliable web servers ONLY for all our clients projects and other partners in business. As I do not provide a stand alone web hosting service, I am able to maintain a personal service with rock solid server performance.