Low cost hosting

Besides the requirements of standard web hosting plans, Web hosting for e-commerce operation needs a shopping cart that supports online catalog and online payment processing.

Standard Web Hosting Plans

Standard hosting plans varies in terms of programming languages, operating systems and server performance. The commonly used web development languages include PHP, ASP, JSP and PERL. The hosting plans that support those programming languages are referred as PHP Web hosting, ASP Web hosting, JSP Web hosting or PERL Web hosting.
Once you’ve picked up the programming language(s) for your Web development, you still have freedom to choose the operating system that hosts your Websites. Besides ASP which works only on Microsoft Windows, PHP, JSP and PERL work on Windows, Unix and Linux. Hosting plans that support particular operating systems are referred as Window Hosting, Unix Hosting or Linux hosting. When webmasters are talking about Web servers, they’re most interested in the server performance – Managed Web Hosting, Shared Hosting, Dedicated Servers, or Virtual Private Servers (VPS). Shared hosting is the cheapest plan, and you can host as many sites as you like with a Reseller Hosting option. VPS costs around $50 a month, and Dedicated Server plan will cost from $50 – $100 or more a month dependent on storage space and bandwidth of the hosting plan.

E-commerce Web Hosting Plans

Evaluation of e-commerce web hosting plans involves investigation of needed functionality and price comparison of each plan. The comparison of functionality is straight forward, but the comparison of cost for different e-commerce hosting solutions is little bit tricky. Different hosting plans may have different free structures. The cost of each hosting plan often varies on transaction volume. EBay Stores, Yahoo! Store and Microsoft bCentral are the most popular turn-key commerce solutions for small businesses that want to setup online stores easily and fast.

When comparing functionality, there’re many questions to ask: 1) whether a shopping cart accepts online check or eCheck beside support on online credit card and paypal for payment options; 2) whether there’s a limit on the number of products and categories that you can setup; 3) whether it automatically sends out an email notification once an order is placed successfully.

When looking at the cost of commerce operation, you’ll need to ask questions about 1) what’s the basic monthly subscription fee; 2) whether there’s a setup fee for a new online store; 3) whether you have to pay for the addition of new items to the product catalog; 4) how much it charges for each transaction. High volume sites may prefer the plans that charge a higher monthly-fee but a lower fee on each transaction, while low volume sites work better with hosting plans that charge zero or low monthly fee and initial setup fees but a slightly higher fee on each transaction.

Business web hosting is what you need. You have a website you need to put online. When you look around on the internet, there are thousands of choices. How do you choose the right web hosting package for your business?

Reliable web hosting

Business web hosting must be reliable. The last thing you need to worry about is that the provider’s service becomes unavailable for long stretches of time. What kind of uptime guarantee do they provide you with? How long have they been in business?

Hosting support when you need it

What level of support does the company offer you? You may not need 24×7 service but is their support desk open reasonable hours? Beware of companies that only offer email web hosting support. Some of these companies will tell you that they only offer email hosting support in order to keep costs down. What they often don’t say is that they are doing the business part time and can’t possibly be available to answer the phone. When you need help, you may have to wait days to get service.

Ecommerce web hosting

Do you plan to sell online? If so, does the web host have shopping carts available? Are they included for free or are they extra? Get the names of the ecommerce shopping carts they provide, and research their capabilities to be able to determine which one is best for you.

Website response times

Be sure to ask the hosting provider for a list of websites that are hosted on their servers. Enter a few of them into your browser and pay attention to how fast they come up. If all of them take a long time to load, this may indicate that the hosting provider’s servers are overloaded. Doing a ping on the website addresses is another way to measure the time it takes for the server to respond. Keep in mind though, that a ping test will be more of a measure of a bandwidth bottleneck than a server problem.

Web Hosting bandwidth: How much do you get?

How much bandwidth does the web hosting service provide you with every month? If it is only 500mb per month and your website is 50 kilobytes in size, this will only allow 10,000 visitors per month to hit your website. If you expect to need more, make sure you can live with the extra charges the hosting provider will levy. If you website traffic explodes, you may be on the hook for large bandwidth overage charges.

Small business web hosting is a vital part of any success your company will experience online. Doing your homework ahead of time will save you lots of grief later on.