Web Hosting is where your actual web pages, images and Web Site address are located.

Have you considered how important Web Hosting is to your business?

Over the past few months we've spoken to a lot of business owners who've expressed problems with their chosen Web Hosting company. These aren't just tiny irritating problems, these are problems that actually cost the company business - which costs them money.

The kind of problems that people often complain about include:

• lousy support
• unable to get into their server every time, straight away
• servers going down - people can't log on to your site
• security issues - being hacked
• server side scripting, online transactions, and databases not working as they should

If you already are experiencing any of these problems then you already know how taxing they can be, both on your time and your budget.

If you haven't experienced them yet, you can probably see how these kind of problems could cost you your online business.
You simply cannot afford to do business with a bad hosting company.

It will cost you your time, your credibility, your clients and your cash.

You might be thinking, so how is a good Web Hosting service going to cost me?

Well, thankfully you don't have to spend the earth to get great hosting any more.

Alive Hosting offers a great solution for database driven, eCommerce enabled web sites needing Windows NT ASP or Cold Fusion solutions. At only US$25 per month you can have every professional feature you require. Contact us for details.

A good web hosting facility needs to provide you with:

• Great support to help you out with any problems, ideally 24 hrs a day, 365 days a year
  
  
• Fast access (how many people can come onto your site at the same time) - test the sites hosted on the Web Host yourself and see how fast they are at different times of the day
  
  
• Excellent reliability - must be available online at least 99.99% of the time
  
  
• Experience - how long have they been around
  
  
• Sizable disk space (you want a reasonable amount of disk space, at least 5 Mb, for example 1 Mb can store about 30 Web pages or images at an average 30 Kb each)
  
  
• Good security (so that no one can hack into your sites)
  
  
• Easy to use tools to update material to your Web Site, both Web development tools and file transfer tools (which facilitate the transfer of files from your computer to their server)
  
  
• Domain name hosting - they need to be able to virtually host your domain name - make sure you are the contact person for it, not them! They should be able to setup the domain name for you
  
  
• Good data transfer - between 1-2 Gigs of data transfer per month should be ample. This indicates how many people can pull up your pages, it is the data transfer from their server to the visitors local Web browser.
  
  
• Easy email and autoresponder setup - giving you at least 5 pop email accounts, plus one catch all address e.g.. anything@yourdomain.com, that will collect any stray emails sent to your domain name. You want a good number of autoresponders as well, this means when someone sends that address an email, the autoresponder will shoot them back a pre-written email straight away, saving you time and making you look more professional.
  
  
• SSL security, very important for offering secure credit card transactions, often an additional fee
  
  
• Access to log files and statistics showing you your site traffic - this is very important
  
  
• You may need to organise special Web Hosting for your Associate Program if you will be offering replicated pages for your Associates

To find out about excellent Web hosting contact us.