The majority of these sites are enhanced with a link to a free forum board and other free online tools. It is also important to note than most of these sites are for personal use and are generally inadequate for ecommerce.

For some individuals these sites are often sufficient to get them going. However, for ecommerce this approach will not likely provide the flexibility and growth you need.

Why do they offer it for free?

For service providers who offer a few web pages free of charge they are hopeful they can recoup the cost for those pages by placing advertising on the page that is relevant to the keywords they encounter. If you are a netrepreneur this is not helpful. Having links to online co

Platform

A platform is the system the ecommerce business is built on. it could be something simple like a MS FrontPage generated ‘static’ website. Or, It could be a Drupal content management system, with all the bells and whistles, including shopping cart, chat rooms, newsletters, and a podcast.

Many ecommerce businesses start with ‘wizard’ or template generated sites. This type of short sited thinking can be extremely costly in the long run.

Every business should assume they will need a bigger platform. A small business may not have the time to manage a Drupal site, or the resources to hire a programmer who is familiar with Drupal. They need to start with something smaller, and build a bigger platform later.

Programmers

One of the biggest mistakes ecommerce businesses make is believing that all programmers who code in PHP and MySql can handle all CMS platforms. This is not true. Grace Publishing Media, a medium sized social networking business paid $8000 for a platform that never worked, they had to trash it. They hired programmers who were familiar with the software platform, and had a new site within two months, for less than $900.00.

Types of Web Hosting

There are four types of web hosting, community shared, shared, virtual, and dedicated.

Community hosting is free, and is on a site where everyone shares a similar domain name. This type of site is impossible to promote. It may be free, but it will never rank high enough on the search engine sites to generate enough sales to keep the business solvent.

Shared hosting is the most common. It costs about $5 – $25 a month. Each website has their own private space, and their own management panel. The most common admin panels are CPanel and Plesk. The bandwidth, CPU burden, and other web resources are shared.

The second type of hosting is good for a small start up business. The important thing to confirm is that they use up to date databases and they have excellent customer service. However, as the business grows it will cause more burden on the CPU as more people use the site at the same time. This can cause problems that will not only crash the ecommerce site’s website, but it may also cause problems with the adjoining sites.

The third and fourth types of hosting, virtual and dedicated, is more private. A virtual server is one that has been broken into sections. Each ecommerce business has their own section, databases, bandwidth, and admin centre, but the CPU is shared. The ‘burden’ on the system of each website is still controlled tightly. This can cost $25 – $100 a month.

The dedicated server is the same as owning your own server. Everything is private. The business is allowed to max out all their resources without worrying about being limited or suspended by the hosting company. This service regularly costs $50 – $250 a month.

Managed

The most important aspect of hosting for the ecommerce business is finding ‘managed’ hosting. Never opt for unmanaged. It can result in dramatic down times, corruptions, and even having a lost system.

Back Up

No ecommerce business should sign for any hosting service that doesn’t offer backup. However, take a ‘lesson learned’ from companies who preceded yours – also learn how to back up the company on a hard drive in your computer, or a zip file.

Hosting companies, even the big ones, go out of business regularly, losing everything on their servers.

There are a few simple rules to follow if you are in the market for a budget web hosting plan that at the same time doesn’t leave you empty handed on the essential services that you will be needing from time to time. If your website is less than one-hundred pages and doesn’t have any data intensive components such as streaming videos than you can get by with the bare minimum amount of bandwidth and gigabytes of memory and that means a basic plan for about $5.

If you have more than one-hundred pages and or your pages are heavily laden with text and photos then you may want to take the option of shared web hosting for about $10 which is going to give you more bandwidth and memory. That is what you will need for the bare bones basic web hosting service if that is all that you need. You have to bear in mind though that what you are going to be doing with your website also has to be considered.

For instance; if your site is just for reference purposes that is supporting a non Internet business in your community then you can still get by with the low cost basic web hosting service. If however your business is an Internet business that changes the picture considerably. This is because, unless you are marketing a product that only you have and no one can live without, you will be in competition of untold numbers of other people on the Internet.