When looking for a web hosting service

When considering what hosting service will host your company web site you should consider:
• First and foremost, decide what you want on your site in terms of CGI scripting, frames, graphics, Java, javascript and multimedia (audio and/or video). These technologies increases the loading time of your web site pages. In the case of CGI scripting, you need special permission to up-load it to your web site's host server.
• Other things to consider for your site are
  1. A web counter for counting the number of visitors to your site (some web counters will even provide detailed statistics about your visitors like where they are located (country), time of day they visited and more,
  2. Forms for visitors to fill out (can be in the form of a guest book or questionnaire)
  3. E-commerce or secure transactions. If you plan to offer visitors the ability to make purchases online, you will need to have secure transactions capability. This can only be done on a secure server with specialized coding (java, javascript, CGI, Perl etc.), certificate and encryption.
• Your next step will be to arrange hosting of your web site. Does your Internet Service Provider (ISP) provide web hosting service? Generally, free web hosting service can be found on the web. These hosts are able to provide free web sites by placing advertising on each page of your web site. If you do not mind this you are set. Some of these free hosting services will also arrange to register your Domain Name for a fee plus Domain Name registration fee (US $70.00 for the first two years). It should be noted that countries like Jamaica do not have Domain Name registration fees.

For Fee web hosting services provides anywhere from 40 MB to 150 MB of storage space for as low as US $24.95 per month. This price includes as many as 5 e-mail addresses, personal CGI-bin (you are allowed to have CGI scripts on your site), 24 hour technical support and FTP (File Transfer Protocol or the ability to transfer your web site files to your web site) access and more. When considering a company or person to create a web site for your company, you should:
• Check out their web site for broken links. If there are broken or dead links on their site means they do not know what they are doing and will reflect on your business if they create your site.
• Look for e-mail links for contacting them from their site. No e-mail links for contacting them to obtain information or report concerns about their site means they are not interested in their own business. Would you expect them to be concerned about your business?
• Look for links to their existing clients' sites from their own web site. No links to existing clients means
  1. They have no customers or
  2. They are embarrassed to link to their clients' site.
  You may wonder why (see above re: broken links).
• Once you have located web sites of existing clients, contact them and ask if they are satisfied with the service they received, how often their site is updated and whether the people who created the site delivered on time? Do they continue to update the site? If not why?
• Does the web site creator know how to use the META TAGS so that search engines like Yahoo and Excite will find, document and categorize your web site automatically? Will they register your site with any search engines?

Remember, you are not restricted to web site hosts in your area because once you are on the Internet, you have access to all products and services available on the Internet. Once you have decided what you want on your site, arranged a host and Domain Name for site and someone to create the site, you will need to tell the world about your site. If your web site creator did the job right then you will have visitors coming to your site in no time.

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