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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.

Web Server Options

For your business information to be seen on the Internet, it must be "hosted" (or live) on a web server... somewhere... it could even live on a computer in another country on the other side of the world.

There are many places you can use to host your web pages.

You could use the web hosting services provided by:

  • your local dial-up Internet Service Provider (ISP), or
  • a company that specialises in web hosting, or
  • you could run the whole show yourself on your own computer.

The choices you can make here are determined by several factors:

  1. the "impression" you want your business to make,
  2. what you want your website to "achieve", and
  3. your level of "expertise" in looking after your web site.
There are:
  • free or really cheap web hosting services, or
  • paid web hosting services
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Two important things you need to find out about before you make your decision are:

Traffic
Allowance may also need to be made in your budget for the amount of traffic your site is likely to generate. Some ISP's charge a set rate per number of "hits" or accesses to you material, while others charge on a data volume basis - the possible expenses in this area could be anything from $200 to $400 a month once a site becomes really popular! Some ISP's charge a flat rate per annum plus a per megabyte charge for traffic.
Clarify Features
When choosing an ISP, it is important you clarify exactly what features you can use. For example, some do not allow you access to statistics showing you who is looking at your site, and what they're looking at (which doesn't help you decide what's working). Others don't allow you to use cgi scripts, and these are the "programs" that control much of the interactive elements on your site.

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You should have a good close look at your content, and the design, programming and maintenance issues of presenting your information on the Internet, and who is actually going to do it, before you make the decision about where your site is going to live.