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The proper choice of a web hosting plan will depend on the
number and type of web sites you plan to host. The
types of sites discussed here are:
- Blogging sites
- Personal sites
- Informational and affiliate marketing
sites
- Ecommerce sites
- General
considerations (Separate Page)
Hosting for Blogging
Blogging is much like writing in a journal online.
You pick a topic and write about it. Blogging s no longer just an
outlet for your creative juices, people actually make money blogging by
advertising on their blogs. For example, if you sign up for Google
Adsense (it's free) Google will post ads on your blog site that are
appropriate for your content. You get paid when people click on
the Google ads. They don't have to buy anything for you to earn
money. Google shares with you part of the price the advertiser
pays them for posting their ad.
Another way to monetize blogs is through affiliate
marketing. For example, if you write a review comparing Play
Station 2 with the competition in your blog, you could become an
affiliate of some vendor of video games and post their advertisement on
your blog.
A great way to get started blogging is to use a
site that has free hosting for blogs. There are a number of these
free hosting sites you can use. For example
Google has a free blogging site at
http://www.blogspot.com and MSN at
http://wwww.msnspaces.com. One of the
advantages to using Google's Blogspot is that it may help you get your
site listed in the search engine. Google regularly crawls Blogspot
looking for updates. MSN probably does the same with MSNspaces.
If your blog were to attract significant traffic, you may want to set up
your blog under your own name with pay for hosting. In the
blogging community, using a free hosting site gives the impression of
being an inferior site.
Essentially every internet hosting service
provider will supply software specific to blogging in their hosting
plans. The most basic of hosting plans have sufficient
storage and transfer for a blogging site..
Personal Web Sites
There are a number of sites offering free web hosting
other than blogging. You may be tempted to
use one of these free internet hosting service providers, and if you
expect only a few visitors it may work out just fine. Just be
aware that the hosting is not really free, you pay
for the web site hosting
through advertising they will put on your site. This
will distract your visitors and if they click on an ad they will
be taken off you site. The free sites also
tend to have a lot more down time than the paid hosts.
Because of cheap memory, hosting prices have come down to the point
where there is no need to contend with advertising put on your site by an
internet hosting service provider . Good
web hosting can be found for less than $4.00
per month. Unless you put up hundreds of high
resolution photos or a lot of video, one of the starter hosting plans
should be sufficient for a personal web site.
Informational and Affiliate Marketing Sites
An informational site is one that actually does not offer anything
for sale, but may post information about products they manufacture for
resale. It may also include affiliate marketing sites that
advertise other people's products. The one factor that
distinguishes an informational site from an ecommerce site is the lack
of a shopping cart or other means of collecting payment. In
general there is no need for encryption on an informational site.
The hosting requirements for an informational site are determined solely
by the amount of storage and transfer needed for the site. If you
are engaging in affiliate marketing you will undoubtedly want to have
multiple web sites. Choosing a hosting package that allows you to
host multiple web sites will save you a lot of money. Also,
affiliate marketers usually use email advertising to peddle other
people's wares, so an auto responder is a necessity. This is
especially true if you market ebooks, educational videos, and software.
Ecommerce Sites
Some web hosts offer very affordable web building services combined with
hosting service, and very often offer a “free domain for life”.
While these packages sound very attractive for a small business owner
who wants a web presence, proceed with caution and know what you are
getting into. The web sites prepared for you are usually made up
from “off the shelf” units that are proprietary in nature, and cannot be
transferred to another provider. These hosts usually charge
anywhere from five to twenty times the price of the
hosting plans featured on this site.
They claim to provide additional services such as search engine
optimization (SEO) and driving additional traffic to your web site, but
most if not all the work is strictly up to
you. They may provide simple instructions for SEO, but the same
information is freely available on the internet. The convenience
of having a comprehensive program may be worth the additional price.
The down side is that you are locked into their program and will have to
start all over again with a new website and possibly a new domain name
(see the caution below) to change hosts if things go bad. You would be
better off to hire an independent firm to do your SEO and to list your
site with directories to enhance traffic. A web site that has a
lot of free information and a number of very useful utilities for SEO is
Site Solutions.
Putting up an ecommerce site requires the
acceptance of payment. If you have a physical store and accept
credit card payments, you may be tempted to collect credit card
information directly using an encrypted shopping cart. This,
however, involves storing this credit card information in case there are
returns. Security becomes a problem for the small business owner
selling online. An alternative is to use a shopping cart provided
by PayPal or a financial institution more equipped to handle credit card
information. It works like this: after your customer selects the
products he wishes to purchase, he is sent to a secure site at the
financial institution for payment, and then back to your site after
payment is made. The money is periodically transferred to your
bank account. This process can be almost as seamless as having
your own secure payment system, but has the advantage of not having to
deal with sensitive credit card information.
General Considerations
(Separate Page)
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