A beginner’s guide to website options, features, and services.

4. HOSTING

What’s hosting?

Hosting is the service that keeps your website live on the web. A host is basically a computer that’s always turned on and always connected to the internet. When someone types your site's domain name into their browser, the host computer connects to that person's browser and shows them your web site.

Hosting can be paid for on a yearly or monthly basis. Costs range from free to many hundreds per month. Typical small business web sites usually pay from $8 to $25 per month for their hosting service. You’ll usually get a discount for paying for a year’s service in advance.

Types of hosting.

There are two main types of hosting: “virtual hosting” and “dedicated hosting”. Small business web sites typically use virtual hosting. Dedicated hosting costs a lot more and is useful only when your site becomes extremely popular, or if you have very specialized needs such as the need to use custom-built special software on your site.

Choosing a hosting service.

When choosing hosting you have literally hundreds of providers to choose from. How do you decide whom to go with? Assuming you trust your web designer, it’s a good idea to use the hosting service they recommend.

If you decide you want to hunt around for hosting services yourself, you’ll be faced with lots of technical jargon, multiple service levels, different hosting plans, and oodles of features to choose from.

The most important thing is usually reliability. The next most important thing is good customer service. However, there’s often no way to determine if the hosting service actually has good customer service until you need it.

When surveying different hosting services you’ll be confronted with lots of numbers (ie 25 gigabytes of bandwidth, 500 megabytes of disk space, 100 custom email addresses, and much more). The typical small business website will function just fine with most hosting services’ standard plan.

Changing your hosting service.

If you get hosting service and find out six months later that you’re not happy with them for whatever reason, you’ll have to find another host. Part of this process involves having your registrar change their “DNS pointers” to your new host. This is a process best left to your web designer or your new hosting service's tech support department.

Hosting recommendation.

Crunch42 provides reliable hosting for only $99 a year. All clients who get a website from Crunch42 get free hosting for 6 months. This hosting comes with all the features your site will need such as PHP scripting, the MySQL database, custom email addresses and more. More hosting details.

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