When you go to choose a discount web site hosting company, you will notice that there are a lot of choices. Most of the cheap web hosting companies will fall into the same price range, and they all offer similar features. Although you will notice some differences, you may not be able to decide which one is right for you. This is probably because you are trying to make choices based on getting the most features for your money, without knowing what features you will need for your web site. The best way to decide on which hosting company is right for you is to first come up with a working plan of what you want your web site to do before you purchase a budget web hosting plan. This is so that you get the features you need for the price you want to pay.
Let’s say, for example, you want to sell sunglasses. Since you are going to need a lot of pictures on your site and that is going to take up a lot of disk space, you are going to need unlimited disk storage and bandwidth. If you have a large enough catalog, you may even have to go up to a virtual or dedicated plan. Take some time to add up how much storage and transfer you are going to need per month. If all you can afford is a shared plan, you need to call the hosting company and find out how much ‘unlimited’ disk space and data transfer really mean. Cheap web hosting companies all have their limits and if you need the extra space for your jpeg files, you are just going to have to pay the money.
If you are planning on opening a retail site, forget about the free site builder. It doesn’t matter what anyone tells you, the free site builder won’t work for any size retail site. All you get with the free site builder is some generically professional-looking templates, lots of photo galleries and a place to put your shopping cart. With some pen and paper, draw out how customers are going to navigate your website. You will quickly realize that you will need interactive buttons, drop down menus, rollovers, forms, etc. You aren’t going to get those features from a free site builder. Instead, look for items like Dreamweaver and FrontPage extensions and make sure they work with your version of the software. If not, you need to figure out what kind of professional site building software you can come up with. Think about what would make you buy from a website. Remember, even if you only have an informational site, you are going to be competing against thousands of other sites for a viewer’s ten seconds of attention. The most important thing for visitors to your site is that they can navigate around it easily.
The next most important thing to think about for your customers is how they are going to pay. You really can’t do business without an SSL certificate. Check to see if your discount web hosting plan offers one at a good price. If you have a small site, some hosting companies offer a shared hosting SSL certificate for free. Most discount web site hosting companies also make it sound like you can take credit cards just by signing up with one of their plans. You can’t. You have to get a merchant account first with your bank. Also check to see if your hosting company’s data center is protected against identity theft. No one will shop with you if they think their credit is at risk. Shopping carts are also important. Look for a discount web site hosting company that offers two or three. Shopping carts are a matter of personal preference, but it’s nice to have variety if you decide to go a different route.
If you already have site building software that you like, go ahead and build your site and then shop for a discount web site hosting company. If your site is already working offline, then you try it out live with several different hosting companies. Most hosting companies have a thirty day free trial. The mistake that most people make is to sign a contract and immediately launch a partially working web site. By the time they get around to completing the full design, they realize that some features are not compatible and they can’t get out of the contract. It is better to find out before the thirty days is up that a company won’t work for you and cancel the contract. Then you can move on.
If you don’t have the option of building your site with software before you sign a contract, you can still draw it out with a pen and paper and figure out which free site builder is better for you. You can read enough about their features to figure this out. Another good thing to do is to go through the list of features in a hosting plan and cross off the ones you don’t need. You’ll be surprised at how much a discount web site hosting company can pad the list with things that sound good, but nobody uses.
