If you’ve read the article on the basics of Establishing an Internet Presence, and know what type of site you would like, there are several options with widely varying costs for for hosting your website. The reason for the increased cost has to do with control and performance. The best analogy I can come up with is the difference between bicycles (free services), scooters (low cost services), and cars (semi customized services). All of them get you from one place to another, have different associated capabilities and maintenance costs. None of them are inherently better or worse than the others. It’s a matter of what you need for your business and how much you can afford.
NOTE: As a business, it’s important not to buy more than you need in anticipation of clients that aren’t there — if a bicycle will work for a while, don’t buy a Mercedes. On the other hand, don’t limit your business growth by under investing and locking yourself into an application that limits you and creates a high switching cost later.
For most businesses, the correct answer is to get a set up a website based on a content management system — WordPress is ideal for most users — that will allow one or more people in the business to maintain the website. Further, most major web hosting providers offer a facility to quickly and easily install this application. The challenge for most small buisinesses, however, is getting the system configured and optimized to get a high search engine ranking, etc.
The Bicycle: Getting your business online for free
Google offers the least expensive options for getting online with a combination of Goggle Sites, Blogger, and Gmail. If you just want a blogging site, there are options [thkBC height="700" width="1000" anchortext="www.wordpress.com" title="Wordpress Website" url="http://www.wordpress.com" type="iframe"]. These solutions are simple, user friendly, and is something that anyone who has used Google or Yahoo Mail can set up.
The benefits of free sites are that it costs you absolutely nothing to get started. Just sign up for the services you want, and you are ready to go in minutes.
The drawbacks with using free sites are:
- You don’t have the branding that you get from having your own domain
- You are limited to the display templates that are are provided
- You are limited in some of the optimization that you can do to improve your sites search engine rank — the lower you rank the less likely people are to find it
The Scooter: Getting your business online for $10/year
Yes, you can get your business online for around $10/year with a custom domain name. The $10 is the fee for registering your domain name. I like [thkBC height="700" width="1000" anchortext="www.godaddy.com" title="GoDaddy Website" url="http://www.godaddy.com" type="iframe"] as a domain name registrar. They’re inexpensive, and offer a great user interface for configuring DNS (Directory Name Service) which is a vital but little understood aspect of aspect of establishing a presence online.
Once you have registered your domain name, you can set up your mail, website, file sharing, and calendars for your business with the free, Standard Edition of Google Apps.
The benefits of using the Google Apps Standard Edition are:
- It costs you about $10 to get your own personal domain depending on the registrar you choose.
- Your data is secure, backed up, and available 99.9% of the time
- You get additional intranet collaboration tools that you can use for your business — like calendars and web sites that only your employees/authorized users can see
The drawbacks with using Google Apps Standard Edition are:
- You are limited to the display templates that are are provided (though they are pretty customizable!)
- You are limited in some of the optimization that you can make to improve your sites search engine rank — the lower you rank the less likely people are to find it
- There are few “bells and whistles” you can add to to attract people to your business
Once you’ve signed up and configured your Domain Name Services (DNS) with GoDaddy or other registrar you can be up and running as fast as you can configure and load the system.
The Car: Getting your business online for around $10/Month
At this point, you’re likely asking yourself why you would want to pay up to $10/month to have your business online if you could get the same functionality for free. The fact is that it’s not the same functionality. What the additional expense gets you is more control over how your content is displayed, the look and feel of your site, options for optimizing your site for search engines, etc.
The trade-off here appears to be choosing between building and maintaining your own website site and getting a “canned,” pre-built solution. This is somewhat true. Larger web hosting service providers offer tools to install popular website applications such as WordPress — which I strongly recommend for most small business websites in most cases.
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