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Actually getting your website online is not the only responsibility that your host has and thus there are a multitude of factors that have to be taken into consideration before you choose which hosting company to invest your trust and money in.

The first factor that will draw your attention is of course the place. There is no chance that you will choose a package that is too expensive for your budget, regardless of how good the features and services contained within the pack are. It is important when looking at these figures to be careful of whether the prices are annual or monthly. Different companies price their packages by different time frames, so it is imperative to be vigilant here so as not to be caught out.

Uptime is also important. There is absolutely no point in setting yourself up with a web host that is going to be down half the time. No-one can see your website then and your money has been wasted. For more information on how important uptime is, read our post on it here.

You also have to consider web space and bandwidth. The former is the amount of space you have to store all the files for your website, like all the pages and any images that you use. Estimating how much space you will need means you won’t be caught out by cheap deals with little space. Bandwidth, in basic terms, is the amount of traffic that can come in to your website. If you are envisaging a lot of visitors, you are obviously going to need more bandwidth. It’s as simple as that.

E-mail services are another factor worth considering. Some hosts offer the ability to set up e-mail addresses connected to your website with the number of addresses allowed being dependant on the package. In order to find the best deal for you, you must decide how many addresses you will actually need and also how many you can afford.

So basically, there are a huge number of features that you need to look at when comparing the many different hosting websites there are out there. Only you can know what features you need and how much you are willing to pay in order to get your website running to the highest of standards.

All of these factors above and many more besides are of paramount importance when choosing your host, so it is very important that you know what you want and shop around to see as many different offers as you possibly can find.

simplewebhosting.co.uk is one of the UK’s longest established web hosts.

But how do you choose the right professional for the job? Well, allow me to tell you.

Any web designer worth their salt has their own web page. For this reason, it is always worth doing a web search in order to see if you can find anyone that catches your eye. You can even refine your search to find only designers in your area or those that are based in a particular country. We hope you’ll agree that OUR webpage does the job nicely

Viewing a few of the designers’ websites can be a very nice way to sort the good ones from the not so good as, generally, someone who is able to produce a stylish design for their own website is going to be able to produce a stylish design for your website. If the designer has an aesthetically poor web page, then the odds are that they won’t be able to produce a solid design for your website either.

If none of the organisations and people you come across take you eye, or even if you just want to find some more alternatives, there are various online directories of web designers and also websites that designers congregate on that are set up for prospective clients (which here means you) to present details of the job they want doing. Then, designers are invited to bid for the project and the client chooses who they want to hire for the job.

These websites are useful as they often have a rating attached to each designer based on reviews from previous clients. This allows you to get a feel for how reliable a worker the designer is and how high the quality of their work is. The same can be achieved by testimonials from customers on the websites of designers.

However, you must always be aware that only pleased customers would have provided positive testimonials and the designer would not print the bad reviews. Due to this, independently produced feedback ratings are a far more reliable way of judging how good a designer is.

So basically, there is no definitive way to find a good web designer, but there is very little chance that the first one you come across is the best you could possibly have. You are unlikely to find the right designer by doing a very quick search. It in fact takes a great deal of research and a look through some comprehensive feedback to ensure that you pick someone who knows what they are doing and will be able to make your web page look fantastic.

simplewebhosting.co.uk can design your website for a little as £149. Find out more.

An online arm is now almost essential for any business. Not only does it give the opportunity for another wave of sales along with your physical point of sale selling, but ecommerce allows sales to happen in an easier and more convenient way, over the Internet, meaning that your customers don’t even have to leave the warmth of their homes.

There is little question as to whether going out to a shop or buying online is easier. It is obvious that a customer would much rather find the item online and order it from a website, waiting for it to turn up at their door. This is reflected by the fact that high street stores are being forced to close and that online retailers such as Amazon are getting gradually bigger shares of overall sales, particularly around the Christmas period.

This shows that the market for online business is huge already and is continuing to grow every year as more and more people convert from high street shopping to doing it all from the comfort of their armchair at home. Due to this growth, it is all the more important that your business capitalises on this trend and moves itself into the online market as quickly as is possible.

So the next question is, how do you do it? Well, all you really need is a website and a simple payment system. Domain names can be picked up very cheaply and hosting is equally so. There are websites that enable you to set up simple shopping cart systems and also developers who will charge a very small fee for a higher quality system, along with customer support bundled in.

Alternatively, you can choose not to bother with a fancy system and instead just ask for money to be paid to you manually via your chosen payment method in return for your goods or services. This method can be just as effective as a clever and intricate system and also can save you a bit of extra money in the process, whilst also meaning that the customers put their trust in a person instead of a fancy online system.

So ecommerce is easy to set up, depending on how complex you want to go and it can also be a hugely beneficial method to bring online sales into your company and transfer your products to a wider audience than what you would get from selling them in the high street.

It is certainly a method that companies should take on if they truly wish to capitalise on the trends and now it is likely to be a battle not of who can do it, but who can do it best.

Find out more about the great e-commerce solutions simplewebhosting.co.uk offers and get YOUR webshop online today!

Yes, this may look too good to be true but it’s really not! When you order any simplewebhosting.co.uk hosting plan, we’ll create a three-page website for your business or organisation for just £20.

We don’t use off-the-shelf templates for any of our web designs; whether you pay £20 or £2000, every single web site we produce is individually created by our talented web designers.

Find out more and get yourself online today.

To your huge annoyance, the page doesn’t load and a message comes up telling you the website is down. Slightly disheartened, you return to your search page and continue to browse. Are you ever going to visit that website again to have a look at what they have to sell? No, you aren’t. You will find another one that offers the product you want and you will buy from there.

The point of that example was to illustrate how detrimental downtime can be to a business. If your online presence is not around at the time someone is doing the research for how to spend their money, then you aren’t going to get the custom of that person. They will simply carry on looking and find someone else. Search engines throw up thousands of results for almost every product a customer could possibly want, so one website that ends up being down is not of massive importance to any prospective buyer.

Webmasters are constantly fighting to ensure that their percentage uptime is as high as possible. The best hosting packages wear their uptime on their chests like badges of honour as it is perhaps the single most important thing for a package. Your pages can be covered in fancy coding and beautifully written content, but all of that means absolutely nothing if people cannot access your website because your host is experiencing downtime.

Quite simply, uptime equals success. The more time your website spends online, the more chance you have of an interested party coming across it and deciding to contact you as to your products and services. It is simply a case of longer exposure time leading to more chance of being seen. It makes logical sense, which means that it is imperative that you select your web host carefully, making sure they have a good reputation for keeping pages online and not falling apart every time a page gets a high level of traffic.

So the crux of the matter is that any website that wants to make money needs to make sure that they are online for as long and consistent a time as possible as this shows not only reliability on the part of the company, but also allows the interested person to gain information about your business and products, which means they know what they are buying and have the facility to buy it.

Uptime is what makes a website tick and therefore, uptime can keep your business ticking and downtime… well downtime stops the clock.

simplewebhosting.co.uk offers all web hosting customers an uptime guarantee. We guarantee that your website will be available 99.9% of every month (but of course, we aim for 100%!) You can view our uptime reports for the last 12 months and see proof that we’ve never even once failed our uptime guarantee.

For February 2010 we achieved an awesome 99.99% average uptime across all simplewebhosting.co.uk servers with all but three machines hitting 100%. That’s just 19 minutes of downtime for the whole month.

We take web hosting uptime very seriously because if your website is not online then it’s not much use to you. Our servers are monitored 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year and should a machine ever become unresponsive, our duty technicians are paged with 60 seconds.

Don’t forget, at simplewebhosting.co.uk we guarantee that your website will be available 99.9% of the time – and we haven’t failed you yet!

We’ve now taken this a step further and have a growing selection of tutorial videos created just for simplewebhosting.co.uk customers. All available in full HD, our tutorials give you step-by-step instructions on all sorts of topics such as ‘How to add a WordPress blog to your simplewebhosting.co.uk Advanced Plan’ and ‘Serif WebPlus X2 – How to publish your website for the first time with simplewebhosting.co.uk’.

You can view all of our simplewebhosting.co.uk videos on our YouTube channel at www.simplewebhosting.tv (or directly on YouTube at www.youtube.com/simplewebhosting

If you have a suggestion for a future simplewebhosting.co.uk tutorial video, contact us and we’ll get right on it!

Also, it is important for companies to ensure that they have regularly updated content on their website. This is the only way that people are going to return to the website regularly and therefore it is the only way they will come across information on new services and offers that your organisation has set up.

Without doubt, the best way for a company to provide content that is engaging and can be updated is to set up a blog. This means that they can not only boost their content levels, but they can also give the impression of being personable and ready to communicate with customers on more than simply a business level.

There is no hard and fast rule as to what kind of content you should put on a company blog, but usually your content should centre around the subject that you have expertise in. This usually means that your blog content should focus around the product you are trying to sell. Of course, this does not mean that you should limit your content stringently to that one specific subject, but in fact that everything you write should relate to your product in some way. Irrelevant content will not help anyone, least of all your company.

As well as the personal layer a blog adds to your organisation, it also has benefits in terms of search engine optimisation. Blog posts containing key words are always useful to drive traffic to your website through search engines. The more times a certain key word is used, the higher your site will rank in the search pages. Obviously, you have to integrate these words into your work; otherwise it is clear that your content has not had very much effort put into it.

The main danger with blogs is that it is easy to forget to update them and this means that the entire concept of engaging and regularly updated content is thrown out of the window. It is important that you have someone dedicated who you can rely on to produce regular content to the same high quality as they began with. There is nothing worse than a blog which goes off the boil after the first month or so. A blog that does not get updated is absolutely no use to anyone and isn’t going to do your company any favours.

Nonetheless, a blog is a fabulous tool for any company as the benefits of it are huge and it gives your website a more interesting feel and gives prospective customers some information about why your company has the expertise required and why they should buy from you.

… or if you buy our Advanced Plan today, you pay exactly the same price you would have done if you’d bought it on 1st February, 2004 when our website looked like this:

We believe this shows our commitment to providing the best web hosting service at the best prices. In fact, we guarantee it!

You can find out more about our guarantees on our web hosting pages.