Business Hosting
A company website or an online store is the best way to reach millions of potential customers with minimum expenses. The site does not require additional office space or employees to take care of it, and people can open it 24/7 to check what services the company is offering or to purchase goods from any country around the world. It will boost your sales significantly and will show your customers and partners that you stay up to date with the new trends and technologies. A business online presence requires a few things - a good domain name, a stable hosting service and a professional website. The domain name is usually the company name, but it can also be connected to a specific product, a service or a marketing campaign. It should be something that people will remember easily, but also something that will distinguish you from the rival companies. A domain can be up to 64 characters long and can also contain a dash. Since it is not case-sensitive, you can include a few words that make up a good phrase or the whole company name, for example. There are different domain extensions to choose from - the generic (gTLD) .com, .net, .org, .pro, .biz, or the country-code extensions that are specific for each country - .me, .es, .de, .com.mx and so on. The Colombian .co extension, for example, is popular with lots of companies, although many enterprises also want to have the most popular .com TLD. You should also consider the target group of your website when you choose the domain name. An Australian citizen is more likely to purchase something from a .com.au website rather than from a .fr website, so there are different strategies how to reach more people and convince them to purchase your goods and services. For a local company, you can have one .com and one local website version, while for an international company, along with a generic TLD, you can get country-code TLDs for a few countries where you expect most of the customers to come from. The websites can be in their native language, which will make your company more trustworthy in their eyes.
When people type the domain name in their browser, they will open the website files that are located in a hosting account on servers that belong to a given hosting provider. In simple terms, this is the disk space on a server, just like a folder on your local computer. Along with this, a hosting account also comes with a number of other services. You can create emails such as sales@domain.com or info@domain.com for general use using the company's domain name, and personal emails for all employees. For any respectable company, this service is of crucial importance for the online communication with customers and partners. The email accounts can be used via webmail or set up with any email client such as Outlook or Thunderbird.
The most common type of web hosting is the shared web hosting solution. With this type, the resources of the server are allocated amongst a number of accounts and you will pay only for what your account uses. This is important for a small company with a tight budget as this type of hosting is really cheap, but at the same time the accounts are powerful enough to support a medium corporate website or a small to medium online store. For busier sites with more visitors, or stores that run heavy, resource-demanding scripts, there are two more powerful hosting solutions - a Virtual Private Server and a dedicated server. With the first option, only a few people share a physical machine, so the resources greatly exceed those of a shared hosting account. There is a website hosting Control Panel tool to manage the files, emails, databases and so on, and the VPS management is done through a virtualization panel tool via which you can restart the VPS, update server software applications, etc. The dedicated server is similar to the VPS in terms of management, but it is a whole machine available to a single client, so your only limit would be the server hardware. The latter two types are more expensive than a shared hosting account, but they have the capability to handle the load generated by sites with thousands, even millions of daily hits. A large portal or a busy e-commerce site would require a lot of resources.
Last, but not least, is the actual website. One option is to spend hundreds, even thousands of dollars for a web designer who would create and maintain the site. As web design platforms have developed a lot, however, there are much cheaper options. Any program, such as Adobe Dreamweaver, can be used to create a website, and you can then simply upload the files. Lonex Hosting is one of the companies that offer an alternative - a free online website builder with each and every of their shared hosting plans, which can be used to create professional-looking websites. You can also use a script-driven web design platform such as Joomla or Drupal. They can be used for any type of website and have thousands of plug-ins and templates, which give them a lot of additional functionalities. They can also be used to create online stores, although many users prefer to use scripts that are specifically created for this purpose - OsCommerce and Zen Cart are just two examples. They have built-in shopping carts, so as long as you have a merchant account with a payment processor, you can add your products and start selling them right away. The scripts also support paid downloads.
Having a website today is important for any business entity as it shows that the company is professional and up to date with the latest trends. It also shows a dedication to stay close to customers and partners at all times and makes the communication with them easier than ever before.