Most, if not all, businesses find it worthwhile to have a presence on the Web. The number of people still reaching for the old paper Yellow Pages when they need to find a local business is on the decline, with major cities like San Francisco banning the distribution of the venerable phone book unless a resident deliberately opts-in to the delivery.
An online presence is often multifaceted, with needs ranging from pages on such popular social networks as Facebook or Twitter to listings on local search sites like Yelp and Google Places.
If you’re just beginning to think about making your business easier to find online, though, you might want to start with a website of your own.
Create a domain
The two basic necessities for getting a website online are a domain name and a Web host. Your domain name is the address a visitor will enter to find your site, like LocalRestaurantExample.com. You can secure your domain name from a number of vendors for between $8 and $20 a year. You may have heard of some of the larger domain vendors — also known as registrars — such as GoDaddy.com, which is well-known for its Super Bowl advertisements.
Finding a Web-hosting company you can trust, though, can be difficult. As you look around for a hosting provider, you’ll encounter offers claiming to host your website for free or to offer unlimited bandwidth or storage space. Often these offers are deceptive. Free hosting plans might include advertisements for other businesses on your website. And there’s a reason why bandwith or storage space is unlimited. A small website will rarely use much of either. But a large site will consume enough resources like memory or processing power to make the host demand you buy a more expensive plan.
Secrets of sharing
Cheaper hosting options are also generally “shared” plans. A shared plan places your website on a server with dozens or hundreds of others. You’ll find that when other sites on the server have high traffic, your own becomes slow or unavailable.
A hosting provider may work hard to keep websites separate on its server, but a security issue on one may lead to your own being defaced or taken offline.
Shared hosting plans can be purchased for between $5 and $25 a month.
Dedicated hosting
Alternatives to shared hosting are dedicated hosting — where your site is on its own physical or virtual server — and turnkey, third-party providers. A dedicated hosting plan allocates an entire server to your site, which can be expensive and is likely overkill if you’re just getting started. Virtual dedicated plans, though, provide you with a smaller portion of a server and can be suitable for small websites at between $25 and $50 a month. With these plans, you are sharing a server with other websites, but your site is better separated and your provider can better guarantee consistent service.
A turnkey provider like SquareSpace.com and WordPress.com is where your backups, software and hosting all come from a single company. These packages are often ideal for someone just starting off, but they do limit what you can accomplish with your site. These plans start around $15 per month.
As with most things these days, with Web hosting you get what you pay for. If you choose a free Web host, your website is at the mercy of other business ads surrounding your site. If you put time, effort and money into building a large, complex website, you’ll likely want to protect that investment with a more expensive, dedicated Web host.