Why We Need to Create a Web Site for Small Business

No need to explain more on this one, you will need to build web site for a small business to:
# Build credibility: Customers expect to find you online
# Makes it easy for prospects to learn about your company, contact you, or get directions to your location
# Expands your reach beyond your local geographic area
# Enables you to pursue a host of targeted, low-cost marketing strategies

Choose a Name for Small Business Web Site

First, you will need to think about a domain for your company site, choose something that will make sense to your business. Unless you want to spend a lot of money to advertise your web site, you will need to think about a domain name related to your product or service.

What kinds of Web Hosting You Need for Small Business Web Site

# Basic Requirement of Web Hosting Plan for a Small Business Web Site

Basic requirement will discuss about the general feature of Small Business Web Hosting, such as disk space, band width, reliability, etc. Those are the basic feature you need to think about when you want to hosting a web site.

- For small company site, a shared Linux Server web hosting plan is the best choice unless you really want to use ASP or .Net to build you site, spending more time and more money. About reliability, 99.9% up time is expected. Don't let your in-stable web site hurt your business. And high access speed is also required.

- Disk space will heavily depend on what you want to put online, but normally, you will use less than 100M. You might see most of the web hosting companies provide you huge disk space like 10g, 50g. Just take it, disk space doesn't cost you too much.

- For Email account, 100 email box will be enough and most of web hosting companies will give you it if their plan target at small business market.

- Need the basic e-commerce cart support, such as: Shopping Cart, Paypal, or SSL support.

- What about the server location? Place the server close to your targeted visitor, even you are not in that country. Such as, if you want to sell something in USA, it would be better to find a web hosting company in USA, so that your visitor can access the server faster, it also a way to show your respect to your customer.

- Usually you will get a free domain in web hosting plan, and if you only want one web site, I would like suggest you to get a web hosting plan that only host one site. You won't get it for free.

- Support: We would like to have 24*7 professional courteous support with toll free phone support to make sure the issue of our site can be solved quickly. And the good news here is some top web hosting companies have get this kinds of support center setup with very low cost, and it will not cost you too much.

# Advanced requirement of Web Hosting Plan for a Small Business Web Site

The advanced requirement will discuss about what additional feature you will need in a small business web hosting. And the solution for it will heavily depend on what kind of capability your company has:

- AD Credit
Get some advertising credit from Google or Yahoo to promote your web site and drive the traffic to your business site, it's a good start to practice your internet marketing skill

- SEO Tools
All web site will need SEO tools to promote its site, you might hope web hosting company can provide them unless you are skilled in it and want to do it by yourself or you want to get some other company to provide this service (That means big money need to pay out)

- Web Design Tools
If you have basic knowledge about HTML, and know how to use the tool like Frontpage, you will have no need to have Web Design tools in your web hosting plan, otherwise, it would be good to have some basic web design tools from web hosting company.

# Price

No great comment for this one, just pay what you want and get what you have paid.