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The Small Business Support Network
Helping you get more from your business!

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How to do business on the web.

Free/Cheap Web Hosting Services

When you set up your dial-up account with an ISP, many allow you to put your pages on their web server for free or little outlay. There are also a lot of other "free" hosting services which you can also use. Your web address at (whatever) domainname.com for people to find you might be something like: www.domainname.com/~yourname
  1. Impression:
    A URL like www.domainname.com/~yourname does not show your business at it's best. Certainly clumsy to include on promotional material. Worth considering is what might happen to your business if your ISP goes bust... because your web site disappears too.
  2. Achieve:
    Usually, free sites severely limit the amount of things you can do on them. Such things as shopping cart programs and other interactive features are usually not possible, or are very hard to customise to suit your needs.
  3. Expertise:
    Because you don't need to know anything other than basic HTML, many beginners can easily use this type of service in conjunction with a HTML editing program like Frontpage. Some free services offer editing of your site from your web browser.
Overall

This is probably the easiest option if you don't have much information and you don't want to include any of the "interactive" features which make a WWW site really useful or enjoyable to its users. Quite often you can't also find out who's been visiting and what they've looked at because you may not have access to any statistics...

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The most common option involves payment to place your material on a virtual web server where you are usually allowed to do those "extra" things that can really turn your pages into a better advertisement for your business!