Web Hosting

A web hosting service provides the server space you'll need to store the contents of your web site(s). Your web host also allows your web site to be viewed on the internet. This is a vital component of any home internet business. If you cannot rely on your web hosting service, then your customers cannot rely upon you.

Most web hosting services charge a monthly fee for use of their server space and good web hosts will provide you with a set of monitoring tools, ecommerce tools, databases, javascripts and other power plug-ins, form generators, etc. to make the task of creating and running a web site easier for the webmaster. Some web hosts will also offer promotional assistance in the form of credits at Pay Per Click advertising sites like Overture or Google AdWords, or automated search engine submission tools, and keyword generators.

Before we go any further, I want to warn you away from hosting your internet business on free hosting sites like those offered by Geocities, Fortunecity or Prohosting. A free web host is NOT the place to host a business website of any kind. Not only are the pop-up ads and banners distracting to your customers but they make your site look unprofessional. Also, performance and availability on a free web hosting server is not the most reliable and the hosting provider can pull the rug out from under you at any time. Remember, if you can't rely on your web host, your customers cannot rely upon you.

One particular web hosting service that I have used for three years now and have been very impressed with is

iPowerWeb

I am actually hosting 4 separate web sites with them right now. iPowerWeb has over 300,000 members, some like me with multiple web sites, and has had the #1 best selling web hosting package on the internet for two years in a row. Their Business Pro package includes features I have only seen offered by premium web hosting plans but costs only $7.95/month, which is a very reasonable price for a full web hosting package. The service includes some nice features like free domain registration and free set up, 3000 MB of disk space, 500 email accounts, 50GB of data transfer per month (very nice), full eCommerce support, unlimited email forwards and autoresponders, and full PHP, Frontpage, and MySQL support, just to name a few. You can see the full list of Business Pro features here.

I have been really happy with the customer support provided by iPowerWeb. They give you a toll-free number, a live chat that actually works, and email support. They host all their accounts on high performance HP UNIX servers which is a real bonus considering that so many hosting solutions use unreliable Windows-based platforms for their hosting servers. Essentially, iPowerWeb is providing a full web hosting package with everything you'll need to get your business up an running, regardless of the type of business you decide to run and regardless of your skill level, and offers it all at a really nice price. I have not been able to find another web hosting solution with this level of service and with this many features for anywhere near $7.95/month.

Once you determine your domain name (which we will talk about in the next section), my advice would be to open a Business Pro hosting account with iPowerWeb and have them register your domain for you. This will save you some money on registration costs and domain name transfer fees. Once your hosting account has been created and your domain name approved (usually not more than 2 business days), you will have access to the iPowerWeb control panel called vDeck. After you've logged in to vDeck with your username and password, you'll be ready to start building your website and will get a considerable amount of help from the vDeck guided help system and tool sets. This combined with a good online HTML tutorial and you'll have a website up and running in no time.

If you follow my advice and start out with an internet business geared towards affiliate sales, you'll be surprised at how soon your website will be ready to go "online". With the iPowerWeb account, all the resources you'll need such as shopping carts, databases, and so on will already be available to you if you decide to begin selling your own product or reselling others down the road. The large allowance of bandwidth transfer per month will also be nice if you decide to allow downloads of informational products or otherwise large files.

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