Hosting your site with the wrong company can cost you countless website visitors and dollars. I learned this the hard way, but you don't have to....
From the desk of Jim Daniels, Owner of BizWeb2000.com.
Dear fellow cyber business owner,
Many of you reading this right now probably know that I live and breathe the Internet. I've been making a comfortable living on the web since 1996. What most of you may not know is that along the way I hosted this BizWeb2000.com site with a total of seven web hosting companies; admittedly far too many.
But I am not alone. Most small business owners continue to bounce from host to host. If you have been on the web for any length of time, your web hosting experiences may be disturbingly similar. If you're still new to web hosting, you found this report at the right time.
Simple... With an overcrowded web hosting industry, at first glance there is no simple web hosting choice for small business owners. And to complicate matters further, hosting prices ranges from dirt-cheap to exorbitantly over-priced.
So how do you, as a small business owner, select the proper web hosting solution for your company? Perhaps the best way is to learn how not to do it.
Read my little story below and this will become crystal clear. It may even amuse you a bit, how such a successful cyber business owner can learn the simplest of lessons the hard way!
During my first 12 months online (1996/1997) I tried three different web hosting companies. They all fell under the category of "Free web hosting".
Most of this free web space came with whatever ISP connection I was currently on. My sites addresses looked something like www.users.aol/jim and www.netcom.com/?user/. I didn't know it at the time, but my business was suffering and it took me too long to learn the following facts about free hosting...
While free hosting is excellent for personal, family, hobby, and "for fun" webmastering, it is not effective for business. In order to operate a profitable business online, a small business owner requires much more than a free host can offer. (Things like speedy servers, no pop-up ads, ownership of your own domain name and 24hr. toll-free telephone support, just for starters.)
If you're doing business online and considering using a free web hosting company, I strongly urge you to reconsider. When people saw my "free" website URL, my business lost credibility and instantly had a strike against it. I didn't know this until I went to the next level of web hosting and my profits immediately increased.
After moving past "free hosting", I tried three "budget" web hosts.
Price was my biggest concern when I stepped up from the free hosting level. This turned out to be yet another mistake. (Starting to get the idea that I learn things the hard way?...)
After three exhausting "budget hosting" experiences, the facts about budget hosting finally became evident. Most budget hosting companies are not a good choice for serious businesses.
Budget hosts usually charge between $4.95 - $10 per month. While these attractive prices result in lots of new customers for these budget hosting companies, all three of my budget hosting experiences ended on a sour note. My small business simply required more reliability and support to grow and prosper online.
When my last "budget host" managed to slowly creep my pricing up to $125 per month because of my rapidly growing web site traffic, I was beginning to wise up. The final straw was when their server crashed and they left my entire site dead for a week while losing all backups of my site.
Unfortunately, that last lesson was a very expensive one. The downtime ended up costing me thousands of dollars. But one good thing came of it. It was the end of my budget web hosting days.
My final take on budget web hosting? The few dollars you think you're saving each month will be lost to sneaky surcharges, frequent down-time, slow and overloaded servers and a variety of other budget web host problems. And when downtime is involved, you may never know just how much your budget web host is costing you, unless you watch your site 24 hours a day!
I've done the budget thing and will NEVER go back.
With 2+ years of trying six web hosting companies behind me, I finally decided that my business was too important to continue bouncing from host to host. I moved to the final tier... professional level web hosting.
In web hosting, just like every other area of business, you get what you pay for.
Let me sum up this report and tell you how you can host your website with this leader...
If I could go back to 1996 and start over, I would do many things exactly the same. One thing I would do differently though is this... I would select a professional web host the first time around.
I can now attest to the "cash value" of fast servers, zero downtime and innovative webmastering tools. I can also tell you that a company that stands ready to assist you - any hour of the day, any day of the week is priceless in today's web hosting industry.
* Article by Jim Daniels of JDD Publishing. Jim's site has helped 1000's of regular folks profit online. Visit http://bizweb2000.com for FREE "how-to" cybermarketing assistance, software, manuals, web services and more. No time to visit the site? Subscribe to their Free, weekly BizWeb E-Gazette: mailto:freegazette@bizweb2000.com