I could waffle on about many things to consider when launching a new online business, but in practical terms, you need three things:

1. A website. Professionally developed to suit your business. Essentially this is a group of files and images.
2. A domain name. This will be your web address and should be reflective of your business name.
3. Web hosting. This is space on a server where your website will be stored. Your domain name will point to the location.

If you were starting up a new shop or business then you would need to rent office or shop space through a real estate agent. Similarly, you can rent server space for your website through a third party. Renting space on another server is the best option as you don’t need to worry about anything technical. All maintenance of the server, including UPS in case of power outages, security and hopefully backups, are taken care of.

There are a ton of suppliers offering web hosting services. Some are extremely economical, even less than $50 per year. I have tried out two of these very cheap suppliers with a friend’s website to test out their offering and service in comparison to the supplier we have been using.

Web Hosting Supplier 1

As they offered support for databases on these cheap packages, we decided to use WordPress with a theme for this website. My friend is a dog breeder so she liked the thought of being able to edit her own content and add articles. The install and configuration went well. I installed three basic plug-ins. One was a lightbox for photographs as my friend has a lot of beautiful photos of her dogs. I spent hours adding content, photos and tweaking the site.

The next day I went to login to the website to complete the work. ‘This account has been closed.’ Huh?

I had trouble finding the method of getting support from this supplier but finally I sent off a query asking why this was happening. Another day passed and I got a response that I was using up too much memory so they closed the account.

email to let me know. No phone call. Nothing.

Just close the account. What great customer service that is … NOT!

I told them that it was a simple WordPress installation and I had done a lot of work with the site. Perhaps the lightbox plug-in was faulty and using up memory. Would they turn on the site long enough for me to disable the plugin?

Eventually they agreed. They tell me they turned it back on and then had to immediately close it due to this memory issue.

All I know is that I never got the chance to disable the plug-in or retrieve my work. This was simple WordPress with nothing fancy. The plug-ins were all well known and established plug-ins which had been downloaded by thousands of people without issue.

Web Hosting Supplier 2

As my friend really liked the WordPress site with theme that we had for a whole 24 hours with Supplier 1, we decided to try another cheap web hosting company with the same theme but not install the lightbox plug-in just in case.

Installation, configuration, theme, adding content and photos was all going well. Maybe we had a winner this time.

Then all of a sudden we cannot upload photos and get an out of memory error. A check of the disk space revealed there was plenty of space left. The photos were a small size, all around 30 – 40 Kb.

All the FAQs regarding this error from the WordPress gurus say that you need to ask the supplier to increase the php memory limit. I sent off my request and received a NO back. They don’t do this, but you could always buy a more expensive package and then they would increase it. Ahh … the catch!

Conclusion

My conclusion after the above experiences are that you get what you pay for. If you have a very basic static website then you may be fine with one of these cheap packages. If something does go wrong, don’t expect great customer service, if any at all.

The supplier we generally use for web hosting is certainly not the cheapest around, but we have never had any major issues with the hosting of any sites, and have always had reliable customer service.

When we build websites for customers, we always give them the option of what type of web hosting they would like. However, we will not support a site that is located on another server other than our preferred supplier. If the customer has any problems, then they have to deal directly with the cheaper supplier to have the problem rectified.

Rather than going for the cheapest possible solution you can find, you are better looking for value for money and a return on your investment. Your first venture into the online environment is a big decision and can easily turn into a mitigated disaster.

An example that comes to mind is a small business where I quoted on a solution but the owner wanted to look for a cheaper quote. I have no problem with that. Everyone should shop around and research before making a decision.

The requirements were for a business website with content management system for the staff to upload images, specials and other copy, functionality for newsletter subscriptions and all other associated needs such as hosting.

This business owner found a company in India that built the website for a low cost. The end result was a basic site with no content management system and no hosting. The site is poorly coded in Dreamweaver with lots of tables for layout. The business owner frantically hunted around for hosting and found a cheap solution in the US.

So what is the problem?

The customers for this particular small business are basically local at a regional level, with a smattering of interstate customers, but all within Australia. The website was supposed to be aimed at the Australian customer. With no direction or strategy, the domain was registered as a .com and the hosting is in the US. As far as Google or any other search engine is concerned, this is an American business. It does not appear in local search and will now not be visible to the Australian customers looking for this service. It will only appear on a global search and only for the business name. Of course, Webmaster tools allows geographic targeting, but the India company failed to offer any advice and the business owner does not know this.

Has this business wasted their money? Time will tell. Most likely this business owner will come to the conclusion that the Internet does not enhance business and having a website did not make any difference to turnover. A golden opportunity has been missed.

A saying that I heard my mother say comes to mind here:

Pay peanuts and get monkeys