With the basic free or low-cost hosting packages, you get around 500MB of space and 10 gigabytes of bandwidth and for the average brochure site this will be more than enough. However, some businesses need a bit more space.
An estate agency, for example, may have a website for showing customers around its properties and this will require lots of high quality images on the site. If you run a bookshop you may want to include a couple of thousand of your best sellers with photos of the covers as well.
With images and sounds, the size of your website will be significantly larger and will need more space on the hosting company’s server. Even if you’ve started off with a basic site, it may not be long before you want to expand it.
It’s worth checking the scalability of the service you choose. Most web hosting companies offer two or three packages above the entry-level package. These will generally offer more space, more data transfer, more email accounts plus features such as real audio and video streams and more advanced CGI-scripts, common feturers of Web 2.0 sites.
Hosting for E-commerce
As you get used to the internet and start to realise its potential, you may want to move a step further than the online brochure.
“A few years ago, companies had brochure site and contact information. But small businesses are usually trying to sell something. So eventually they will be looking to put catalogue entries on the site and develop e-commerce,” says Graham Clark, IBM small business programmes manager.
There are two ways you can add online shopping to your site. If you have some spare time and some basic technical expertise, you can spend around £300 on e-commerce software. Once this is set up on your site, a basic hosting package including a CGI-bin should still be sufficient to keep your site running smoothly.
If, however, you want some help developing the e-commerce side of your website, it may be worth enlisting the help of either an independent web site developer or a web hosting company that offers e-commerce solutions. The good news here is that costs are coming down.
“E-commerce packages are now incredibly low cost. For £500 or less you can have a robust e-commerce site,” comments Mike Gordon, general manager of web hosting company Virtual Internet.
The advantage of using a web hosting company is that they will be able to develop the site and ensure that it is on a server that has the connectivity, space, and security measures that you require.