Just about every time we build a new website for a new client, the subject of web hosting comes up. All too often, business owners fall into the FREE hosting trap their cable company or DSL provider gives them with their internet service. Most ISP’s (internet service providers) give you a nice sized hosting account when you buy internet service from them. That’s all well and good if you want to put a little website up about your family vacation to the Poconos. However, they fail to offer even a fraction of the features, amenities, and safeguards of a professional web hosting company.
While your lab manager may be a genius with tools I doubt very seriously you would ask them to cut and fit lenses with a rasp file and an emery board. You spend tens of thousands of dollars for a quality edger and finisher so that the lenses you fit to each frame are precisely cut to match the frame and the personal prescription of each patient. Why should your web host be any less professional?
Around the office we’ve grown so weary having to debate such a fundamental principle that we now offer FREE professional web hosting with every new site just to ensure everything goes smoothly for all concerned. Those entities we’ve done this for have yet to have complaint #1 about the hosting.
Thankfully, you needn’t pay tens of thousands of dollars to host your website. In fact, for most ECP’s, your hosting should run you well under $100 a year. There are countless thousands of web hosting companies out there, big and small. A large majority offer everything you could want or need.
So, what should you look for in a hosting company? Space and bandwidth (which most hosting companies promote are almost all in excess of anything a single practice/store or even a decent sized chain of practice/stores could ever exceed. By the way, while doing business locally is very noble, there is no practical reason your webhost need be local. What are you going to do if your site goes down for a few hours? Drive over and help them setup a new server and reconfigure your DNS settings? So let’s move on to the extras.
- Email…. STOP using your AOL or HOTMAIL as your professional email. Start using an email attached to your business. Most web hosts offer decent email accounts with hosting.
- Webmail… most hosts will give you access to your email via a webmail account that you can access anywhere in the world.
- Blog…A professional hosting company usually offers several blog platforms and will install them for you free of charge.
- E-commerce…should you someday want to get into ecommerce, it’s nice to know that your host supports commerce solutions. Many offer free limited e-commerce accounts with hosting. However, if you are going to get serious and start selling thousands of items, you want to get serious with who hosts what e-commerce engine. This is a costly and time consuming enterprise.
- Add-ons… each host provides a number of add-ons that you might want to consider as part of your web strategy…some for a premium price, most for free.
- Stats package….each host offers varying statistic packages. Some a great resources of information to help you further refine your web strategy…some are totally worthless.
Here is a small list of web hosting companies we have worked with and like. This is hardly a complete list of good hosts, but it is a good start should you want to investigate new hosting for your site.
- Go Daddy – Good customer support….tiny email accounts though
- Hostgator – Good pricing – 130% powered by wind energy
- Host Monster – lots of addons
- Bluehost – highly recommended
- iPage – very inexpensive
- Ipower – 100% wind powered
- Lexicon – great with e-commerce
