May 27th, 2008

This is the first post in a series of posts dealing with the setup of an e-business.

For those who don’t know, hosting is an absolutely vital part of your e-commerce success. It is extremely difficult to get your business online if you don’t have an adequate hosting company. Many large online businesses host their own websites, but for a small startup, this is out of the question. Your host will handle all the necessary technical issues that relate to keeping your site on the internet.

Choosing a hosting company can be daunting task, especially if you have no understanding or no interest in understanding the ins and outs of this technology. So, where do you begin? Firstly let me say that you have a couple of options, you can host locally or internationally, you can also host on a Linux server or you can host on a windows server.

Hosting locally has many benefits, some of which I’m sure you guessed. Let me list a few of these advantages: Local support, faster loading websites for local users and no downtime related to the international link being down. The major disadvantage for local hosting, however, is simply the cost of bandwidth. Once your site begins growing and gets more and more traffic, it’s going to be using more and more bandwidth and you are going to be charged heavily for that bandwidth.

Hosting internationally can work out a lot cheaper, but there are also some difficulties. As mentioned above, when the international connection goes down you site will be unavailable to local users. Your site will load quite a lot slower than a locally hosted site. Overall it’s a good idea to do a lot of research into exactly what your needs will be.

In terms of choosing whether or not to host on a Linux server or a Windows server you need to consider your e-commerce software needs which will be discussed in a future post of this series. In short, most e-commerce software has certain requirements and most often can only be hosted on a Linux server.

 

Useful links:

WordPress on Speed: 17 Tweaks to Accelerate your WP

Top 50 Guides for Beginning Web Developers