What is the Best Web Hosting for Small Business? Small Business Web Hosting Services

What is the Best Web Hosting for Small Business? This question comes up numerous times. The reason for this is it is not a easy question to answer as there are numerous hosting providers out there.

Plus small business owners want to make sure they are making the right choice. As most are aware of the importance of having a well optimized website for desktop computers and mobile devices.

According to a poll of 2000 US internet users done by emarketer.com:

• 36% of the respondents do research online and thats how they locate small businesses locally
• 35% use word of mouth
• 8.4% find a store by walking into it first

As you can see being online is important waiting for people to stumble into your business is a major mistake. That means if your not online you losing close to half of your customers by ignoring online marketing.

Now you can see why it is so important to build a strong web presence. It use to be hard to build a website but has gotten eassier with time. I want to congragulate you for taking the step in creating your own site. The savings of doing your own web site marketing can be cruicual for businesses on a tight budget.

Things to look for in Small Business Web Hosting Services:

• Flexiability (This is crucial that you look at the terms of service before picking. Nothing like building a site and then losing it because you violated one of their terms of service.)
• Affordability
• Ease of use
• Moveable
• Search engine friendly
• Secure
• Fast and Reliable
• Support (24/7) You never know when you will work on your site.
• Automatic Backups

These are the top things to look for. There is also a very important other aspect and that is a strong community. Building a site by yourself is not easy but when you have a strong community it makes it much easier.

Can’t I use a free web hosting company? Wix says it’s free and easy!

The low down on these free sites:

Yes these companies do rope you into thinking they are free and easy. Companies Like:

• Sitebuilder
• Weebly
• Squarespace
• Wix

and many more like these. Even Google has started letting you build free websites with free hosting. They have had Blogger for years now.

A few points to keep in mind when looking at free web hosting especially for a small business.

Free Hosting Sites are Usally not Free:

• Not Flexiable
• Can’t use your own domain name without upgrading to a paid plan
• You have to pay for templates and functionality
• You don’t have control over your site (This one line should be enough for you to understand if you are truly building a real online business)
• Limited by the system you choose for example if you want to add a contact widget you hvae to go with what they offer, pay more or do without.

Free web site hosting for a small business owner is just not optional.

What web hosting company Should I choose?

After years of building web sites and being with hosting services like HostGator, iPage, GoDaddy, SiteGround and others that don’t even still exist I have finally choosen one for all my sites.

The small business web hosting I have choosen provides service others can’t even offer and it has a single price point.

NO UPSELLS!

I can lead a horse to water but I can’t make the horse drink it. If you choose one of the other web hosting companies you will be severly dissappointed.

If you use a Wix, Google or GoDaddy Site builder you are stuck with them. If they happen to go out of business, quit offering hosting services, or you violate their terms your website is going to be a massive nightmare to move if not impossible!

If you go with one of the other webhosting providers like HostGator or SiteGround after your low introductory rate their price goes up tremendously because they know they have you. Most business owners will not move their site.

So What is the Best Web Hosting for Small Business?

It’s actually a system called Wealthy Affiliate. This site IgnitedBiz.com is hosted on Wealthy Affiliates servers. Here are the top reasons I have choosen to use Wealthy Affiliate for my small business Ignited Biz, LLC.

Amazon Servers To Host Your Site

Everyone knows who Amazon is and you know they have a very stable, powerful and top of the line servers. Hosting your companies website on these servers is the way to go! You don’t want your business web site hosted on some server siting in a geeky guy’s basement somewhere do you? Cheap web site hosting is not the way to go.

Affordable Web Hosting for Small Businesses

Wealthy Affiliate is one of the most economical web hosting companies out there. You can start out free using one of their subdomains.

Their full price option there is only two choice pay monthly or a year in advance. No coupons and No Gimmicks with upsells.

Once you’ve gone monthly or yearly you get it all:

• Increased site speed
• Top of the line Security from Intrusions, Hacking and Malware
• Https – This is critical most companies are still charging big money for this (Every Business Needs a Secure Website)
• SiteRubix
• Content templates
• Fast support
• A great community of helpful friendly business owners
• Training Courses (You don’t need to buy any other book or how to program it is all in the Wealthy Affiliate back office)
• Email setup that is easy to follow
• Keyword research tool Jaaxy (This is limited but the functionality you receive on it is plenty for the Small Business Owner)
• Local marketing courses
• There is more and one very special and powerful SEO technique only Wealthy Affiliate (WA) offers. You won’t find this secret marketing tool at any other web hosting company. To buy similar programs that are usaually less affective it would run you over $100 a month.

What is the Best Web Hosting for Small Business?

To simply answer that question it is Wealthy Affiliate. I could go on and on as there are so many more benefits then you will ever find with any other small business web hosting service provider. If you have any questions you can always give us a call at Ignited Biz, LLC at 816-399-5335 and I will be glad to discuss it with you.

 

 

 

 

The post What is the Best Web Hosting for Small Business? Small Business Web Hosting Services appeared first on Ignited Biz, LLC.

source https://ignitedbiz.com/best-web-hosting-for-small-business/

Build a Small Business Website

If you are a local small business shop owner or service provider, you should always be asking yourself:

How do I market, promote and increase sales?

Whats the best way to advertise with the highest ROI?

In today’s digital world the answer often involves websites. Websites are widely used online and offline to promote one’s business. A robust online presence is usually involved in every successful and the well-known company.

Think of a successful company you know. Search their name online. I bet they have a website, right? That’s the online face of their business marketing their business 24/7.

In today’s world where people are more active online than off. That online presence is essential to business success.

Some tops reasons for building a small business website:

Provide information about your products/services to potential buyers

Provide the location of the store and contact information

Establishes a sense of security

Think about it if you did a Google search to find little to no information on a company.

Would you feel that company is going to be around for the long haul?

Or is this a local business that could disappear overnight? Leaving me without the service or product, I paid for. When I think of a company without a website, I think Card Table (Folding Table and Chairs), so they can make a fast get away with my money.

Why You Need A Business Website

Vital statistics on should your business have a well-designed website or not:

Every second matter – customers time is valuable if your site doesn’t load in four seconds or less, over 25% of those who found your site will have left and gone to the competition.
First impressions mean everything and are formed primarily based on the design related elements of your site and information provided. A well-designed site gives your business credibility
Over 75% of online consumers are less likely to return to a place after a bad website experience
Most consumers think that a local businesses mobile website should be the same or better than their desktop website.
Over 50% of users say they wouldn’t recommend a company with a poorly designed mobile site or that is slow loading

Here are the steps to answer the questions:

How to set up a website for small businesses?

How do I get a website for my business?

To start a website, you will need what is called web hosting.

What is Web Hosting?

Web Hosting is a computer server and service used to store and publish websites online. The server is connected to the internet making the sites accessible to internet users. Website data (programming code, HTML files), text, images, and other source files are on computers called servers. These servers are then connected to the internet.

Many times these servers are hosting many websites on them.

The internet uses domain names like street addresses for the internet. A person who wishes to view a particular website types in the domain name in their web browser address bar or finds the domain address through an online search. The hosting server you purchase is contacted and the website data is retrieved and displayed.

Pick a Quality Web Hosting Company

You will want to pick a quality web hosting company.

Why can’t I use a free website builder? Why can’t I just use Facebook?

Using free web hosting is not a good idea for a couple of reasons.

One: It shows most free platforms are free for a reason. They can have links or even images showing that you used their free hosting. This does not display credibility for your company.

Two: You will want to hook up your domain. A domain is https://ignitedbiz.com this is your company’s address online. You don’t want your address to be ignitedbiz.freewebhosting.com – That looks cheap and destroy’s credibility.

Three: The free providers change their terms of use on a constant basis. Nothing like seeing all your work disappear in a flash of a second. These free web hosting sites come and go and again change their terms. Look at Facebook they started limiting the audience that sees’s posts on your Facebook company page. You have to pay them if you want it to be seen by more people.

As you can see picking a great hosting company is crucial as you want to make sure it’s

Secure

Fast

Stable

Easy to Use

Shouldn’t I Pick A Company Domain First?

No, as there are many reasons for this.

First, when you pick a web hosting company, there is a chance you will get it free or discounted.

Second, most of the domain sellers have terrible upsells one after another, for instance, paying for privacy

Third, it will make it much simpler for you if you have your domain and web hosting together. Making setup simple is what we are about.

Once you get the correct hosting, you should be able to start creating a starter website that you can transfer to a domain that you purchase through the small business website hosting company.

What To Look For In Web Hosting Company

What Kind of Hosting Do I Get?

There are so many web hosting choices available to a business looking to get a website up and running. The number of options can make your head spin. It is even possible to get cheap web hosting for just a couple of dollars per month (Most of these require you to pay three years in advance for this price).

Now keep in mind there are hosting plans out there that cost hundreds of dollars per month. Especially if you want a dedicated private server to host your site on.

Shopping for a web hosting company can be a real headache, in fact, it can sometimes look as if the cheap plans are the best. They come with promises like unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storage, unlimited email inboxes, and so on. Most of these features a small local business owner will never need.

For the small business owner, we want to keep the hosting package narrowed down and simple to use. But packed with a lot of features and unique bonuses to make your site rank well.

So how do I pick a reliable web hosting provider?

As always, there’s more to a given web hosting plan than meets the eye. Our focus on this site is to make it simple to setup and straightforward for the small business owner to get up and running quickly. If you try to figure everything out and compare, you will spend a year plus and no site built.

First Decision Is What Website Builder Will You Use

What is a website builder?

A website builder is an online program or system used to construct a website. You use to have to hire a coder to write programing language to build a website. Thankfully those days of having to learn code like HTML to create a site are in the past thanks to dragging and drop website builders.

Now there are ones like:

Wix

Squarespace

Weebly

Godaddy

These can be great but here are the problems with them:

Most have upsell after upsell. Yes, they may look inexpensive, and some even offer a free website on their subdomain. Problem is they lure you in and then to get the website builder to do what you want you to end up having to buy a plugin to get it to function how you want. Or they charge more for fast servers to make your site faster.

Next issue with these companies is once you’re on their web hosting package it is extremely difficult if not impossible to move your site to another web hosting company. The funny thing is they know that and once the introductory rate is gone guess what happens…

I am sure you know they jack up the price because you will never be able to switch. The cost and time not to mention the loss in search engine rankings you might lose.

Support on these sites has not been the best in my experience as most are paid inexperienced workers who probably have never built a website themselves.

FYI I even got certified and went through Wix’s training program.

 

Managed WordPress Hosting

My choice after 15 plus years of experience is to go with a Managed WordPress Hosting solution. Picking WordPress to be my website builder has been the best experience. It has been kind of funny to me as most sites that offer reviews on website builders happen to be built on WordPress themselves but they try to sell Wix, Squarespace, Weebly and others as the best website builder.

WordPress is one of the most widely used website builders out there. Some of the top reasons to pick a managed WordPress solution:

Free and Open Source – To start building with WordPress it is a free website builder

Plugins – Want your site to do something most likely there is a plugin for it

Themes – There are numerous different WordPress business website templates and designs to pick from when building

WordPress – Easy to use and don’t know how to do something there are tons of videos on how to solve your issue

Versatility – It is much easier to move from hosting provider to another. You are not stuck like you would be using Wix, Godaddy, Weebly or others.

There are some drawbacks to WordPress. Take if from me I started with HTML code went to WordPress then to WIX (For a short time) back to WordPress. WordPress has developed and is always at the front for SEO and Creativity.

In the Next Step Learn Which Managed WordPress Hosting We Choose and Why.

Now that we have narrowed down the type of website builder we are using to build a small business website with. The next step will be picking the best-managed WordPress hosting. Hint we didn’t go with the cheapest nor did we go with the most expensive but we choose one with the most bang for the buck.

 

 

 

 

The post Build a Small Business Website appeared first on Ignited Biz, LLC.

source https://ignitedbiz.com/build-a-small-business-website/

How To Start My Own Business? Simple Actionable Steps and Tricks to Make Your Business A Success

I hate to say it that way but……

Most people think most small businesses fail in the first few years. You see this information all over the internet. Saying in excess of 80% of small business will close their doors in their first 5 years.

Do you know why they fail?

Most businesses fail due to lack of effort on marketing… Plain and simple

No marketing means no customers and no customers means no money.

Don’t believe all the crazy hype out there. Most local business owners think they have a storefront people will come. That is just not true and you have to get online where your customers can be found. I go downtown all the time and find little new shops that if people actually knew about it they would visit.

These small local businesses think online marketing is too expensive. Well if you want your storefront to be around you have to have an online marketing plan.

The #1 Myth: Online Marketing is Expensive

People will come to a new business like a restaurant, clothing store, beauty shop, personal trainer and more. Why is that?

It’s New!!!!!!!!!!! And they discovered it by driving by… This creates a false impression that you don’t need marketing that you have plenty of business. As the new wears off what happens?

Business drops off because the business owner has not been regularly promoting their business. It is hard to find a balance.

But if your company is on a limited budget and you want to build a strong foundation for your business we are here to make it as simple as possible for you.

Small local businesses will fail in the first few years without a strong online presence. Now I am assuming you’re wanting to make money at your business and it’s not just a hobby.

Ask yourself about your favorite places you visit.

How many try to get your information to send out updates?

How many do a good job at it?

Do they have an effective email campaign or text message system?

Do they update their websites with specials or events happening each month or week?

instead of asking the question: 

How to start my own business?

Ask:

How Do I Get Customers?

This is extremely important if you can’t grow your business outside your circle of influence. You circle of influence friends and family only go so far and then business will drop off.

Inside here we will show you the best tools and tips for developing your own online marketing campaign for your local business.

For example, lets say you have a cleaning business. With a great online presence, you could offer a free cleaning and let people nominate people who might be in a rough situation currently in their life. A clean house can help people in a bad situation.

Think about not only are you getting help to build your business but you’re helping someone else that is currently at a rough point in their life.

This giving you free publicity online and creating social shares.

The second question you need to ask when starting your own business:

How Do I Keep Customers Coming Back?

You have to figure out a strategy to keep customers coming back in the door. In the second stage of developing your online marketing campaign, we will discuss these tools and tips. An old saying “a bird in hand is better than two in the bush.”

Keeping old clients coming back and building brand loyalty.

 

Assuming you have looked into the legality, licensing and picked a niche you want to specialize in this site will be covering the marketing aspects.

This program is here to drive people to use your business and we will be showing you tips and tricks to getting more customers without expensive advertising.

Out low cost to free methods of advertising will even make other expensive methods to have a higher return on investment (ROI)

Starting My Own Business Step One

OK so let’s get to the first step in building a successful business.

 

 

 

 

The post How To Start My Own Business? Simple Actionable Steps and Tricks to Make Your Business A Success appeared first on Ignited Biz, LLC.

source https://ignitedbiz.com/how-to-start-my-own-business/