Basic Features of Business Web Site Hosting Services

day-to-day operations are automated and self-service. The simple and very capable tools the vendors provide you for setting up and tweaking your site have the beneficial side effect of letting you do most things yourself, with little need for handholding.

This is because the most expensive single thing for the vendor is providing technical and business support to you for when your site goes down or you have problems getting the system to do what you want.

To keep costs down, most vendors offer only email support for basic customers: If you have a problem, you send an email and wait for an answer. For your basic business Web site, this is fine -- it doesn't cripple your business if the site goes down over the weekend because it's basically just a convenience for potential customers.

But if you get a lot of visitors who depend on your site, or generate a lot of sales through the site so that it is an important contributor to your business (if for example your restaurant site is bringing in a lot of reservations), then you will want telephone support, and you'll want it 24 hours a day, seven days a week. If there's a chance you could end up in this situation, only consider signing up with a Web host service that offers fulltime telephone support. It will cost more; it will be worth it.

Web Development Tools

Most Web hosting services offer some sort of Web-site development software, and some offer several choices. Generally the packages they offer are pretty easy to use.

The most useful tools for beginners are the page templates, or preformatted pages, where you just type in your company info in the appropriate spots, just like a Word template, if you've ever used one of those. If you're ambitious or artistic, you can use more advanced programs that let you create your own design from scratch, or modify an existing design.

More advanced users might want to code up their own HTML, either for the whole page or for a specific component you want to incorporate. You can also use more advanced Web design and construction software such as FrontPage, which comes with many versions of Microsoft Office, and will soon be replaced by two new consumer products, Office SharePoint Designer 2007 and the easier-to-use Expression Web. Other widely used coding tools include Macromedia's Dreamweaver, aimed at professionals and ambitious amateurs; and other commercial and free programs such as Avanquest's Web Easy Professional. These require more commitment to learning the ins and outs of Web-page mechanics, of course. As a starting point, look to see what outside design products your hosting service supports with "extensions" that make it easier for the programs to load the completed designs directly onto your site. Just don't let yourself get distracted so that you are spending more time than you can justify tweaking your site.