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Why donate? I want to spend my time directly helping people, like you, by creating and maintaining this website. I do this because it’s a passion of mine – with that said, it’s not cheap running a website these days.

So, if you found this website useful, help me keep this site going and free by donating a small sum to help pay for the hosting and bandwidth bill. It doesn’t matter how much or how little you’d like to donate, every bit helps.

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Thank you for your support and encouragement!

Choose a Good Hosting Service

Once you register your offline business name, you typically look for a good store location. Similarly, once you have registered your domain name, you should now focus on selecting a good web host.

A hosting service ensures that your website with your new domain name is accessible to everyone who browses the Internet. Again, you should remember that cost should not be the deciding factor.

Suggestions that will help you choosing a hosting service

Here are a few suggestions that will help you in choosing a hosting service for your online shop:

• The service must ensure that your site loads quickly. Many customers do not wait for more than a few minutes before they move on to the next website. It is therefore crucial that your host offers you a fast, reliable connection.
  
  
• Look for a hosting service that has an excellent uptime record.  When the hosting company servers go down, so does your website! Imagine the frustration a customer feels when he or she is in the middle of a purchase and your website suddenly becomes inaccessible. A few more instances such as these and the customer is never going to come back.
  
  
• While you should be taking regular backups of all your critical business data, your hosting service should also be taking backups of all the data on your website including database records, preferably on a daily basis.
  
  
• Make sure your hosting service offers you enough storage space. While the amount of storage space you will actually need depends a great deal on the growth of your site, you need to make sure that there is enough space to hold all your current data and to accommodate any kind of growth in the near future.
  
  
• When a visitor views your online shop and browses through your products or services, they are actually downloading data. Again, you should make sure that your hosting service allows you enough data transfer to cover your immediate needs and to accommodate any increase in visitor numbers, at least in the near future. Remember, you will be charged extra for any extra storage space or extra data transfer.
  
  
• Your hosting service should allow you to easily install some standard scripts such as feedback forms, mailing lists, discussion boards, chat rooms – even content management systems such as Joomla or blogging tools. Since you will be running an online shop, the most important application your hosting service should provide you with, is a shopping cart application.
  
  
• You should be allotted enough mailboxes and email aliases so that you can set up different email addresses – webmaster@mystore.com, customer_service@mystore.com, sales@mystore.com, feedback@mystore.com and so on.
  
  
• While most hosting services will provide you with raw visitor data and many may also provide you with some kind of analysis, choose a hosting service that will provide you a thorough breakdown of all the raw statistics. You should be able to easily track the number of unique visitors, page views, pages viewed the most, pages where most visitors quit, referrers, etc.
  
  
• If your online shop is open for business 24/7, there is no reason why you should not get customer service 24/7. Choose a hosting service that offers you unlimited and free customer service both over phone and email.
  
  
• Even if you hire a professional to manage your online shop, you will occasionally need to handle some website administrative tasks like setting up an email alias, uploading or downloading a file and so on. Instead of depending upon your website manager for even the smallest task, if the hosting service has a user-friendly control panel, you can easily handle all these administrative tasks yourself.
  
  
• Many web-hosting services now offer you a 30-day money-back guarantee. Take advantage of this offer and test all the features of the hosting service within the month to see if it meets your requirements.
  
  
• At the beginning, do not enter into a yearly or two-yearly contract. Pay the hosting service month by month so that you can evaluate their services. Though this may cost you a little, it will cost you more if you enter into a yearly contract and then find that the hosting service suffers from too much downtime. You will be torn between having to continue with the service and bear the effects of it on your business or forego of the money you have already paid and consider it as a business loss.
  
  
• Finally and most importantly, your hosting service should allow you to use secure servers so that your customers can make purchases in a secure mode. A secure server capability should be available for some additional cost.