Building eCommerce Web Sites

Most likely you are thinking about putting up a web site or, possibly, moving your site from one host to another. While we’re discussing some of the issues involved, think about that question. Is the issue where to put a web site or is it how to build a successful business?

It can be a daunting experience. Web hosts are everywhere. Sometimes it seems like every second person on the net has started a hosting company. Maybe you’re even thinking of doing the same.

As a commodity business, web hosting looks like a long term winner. The net isn’t going to go away, so people will always need hosting.

The downside is that it is intensely competitive. Not simply in terms of pricing, but also the advertising costs are high. Getting clients is an expensive proposition. The reasons are fairly simple:

• Getting traffic to any site of any kind isn’t easy
• Each lead is potentially a long-term, residual income source
• All those hosting companies want that lead

All of that drives up the costs of PPC and other forms of advertising. Without hidden costs or add-on services for a fee, low-cost hosting is a fairly low margin business.

Most of us, of course, aren’t looking to start a hosting business. We are those highly desirable “leads” that the hosting providers are looking for. And this creates it’s own problems.

You’ll find that most hosting companies make pretty much the same claims about uptime, reliability, connectivity, data center security and on and on.

You need to be clear about what you’re looking for if you want to thread this maze. And you need to be clear about a few of the things you’ll run into.

Free Hosting: Unless you’re just looking for a place to hang a personal web page, stop kidding yourself. If you want to do business, you need a domain of your own and a real hosting account.

Unlimited Anything: First, it’s impossible. Second, it’s defined somewhere in the terms you have to agree to. And that definition is most certainly a limitation on bandwidth, disk space, etc, etc. You need to read EVERYTHING. Maybe they won’t let you store audio or video files or allow streaming or download. Why? Audio and video files are big so storing, streaming or downloading eats up disk and bandwidth.

Hosting companies know that very few sites use much space or bandwidth. Very sites create even 3 MySQL or other databases. Very few sites have a lot of mail lists or create a lot of auto-responders - or email accounts. So the issue of just what “unlimited” really means rarely comes up. But if it does, it can be a shock. You may find your site shut down or some large extra charges on your monthly bill.

Operating Systems: Personal prejudice, based on working with various server operating systems since the ’80s, leads me to suggest that a UNIX/LINUX solution is probably the safest and most secure way to go. No system is perfect, but some are less perfect than others. At the very least, carefully assess your vulnerabilities and why you think a non-UNIX/LINUX system would be better.

Control Panels: Assuming you decide on a UNIX/LINUX solution, cPanel offers some significant advantages. Sooner or later you may want to move and it’s a lot easier with cPanel. In most cases, you can also ask the hosting company to add additional features and it’s fairly simple with cPanel. Since many hosting companies offer cPanel, you can learn it once and have a lot of choices should you decide to move.

CGI, php, MySQL: You will need these. Make sure you get them. Verify that the servers are running current versions.

Fantastico or other automated script installers: You want this too. Maybe not at first, but the capability of automatically installing a variety of script programs (free) for blogs, content management, form handling and so on is something you will like.

If you’re feeling a little dizzy by now, you may not want to go with basic hosting. There are web site hosts that provide tool sets that will let you avoid much of the technical learning curve that can be involved in setting up and running a web site.

If you prefer to concentrate on your business, rather than it’s technical underpinning, you can get someone to build it, run it and manage it. Or you can look into alternatives like SiteBuildIt! (SBI - check the SBI Resources Center) or ThirdSphere Hosting. Both offer integrated systems, that may serve you well.

Check our eCommerce Links for other possibilities.

Creating your business on the internet can be an exciting and richly rewarding path to success, but you need to start right and be sure about what you’re doing and why.

For more information and some superb, very useful (and free) resources, check our SBI Resources Center. Do it before you put up a web site. It will be worth your time.