Day 05: Hosting your business – Offline and Online
After you have created your online identity and name, its time to prepare a premises for it. The online space is the web hosting and the offline space might be a shop or store. In online business, all the messages and web files are usually stored on the server so that they can be accessed easily anytime, anywhere. Offline, the shop becomes the point of contact between you and your customers.
Offline business hosting
It all depends on the business. If you are running a product business, you might need a small room to stock the products or a shop. If it’s a service business, you might need space to provide the service.
However, this might not be necessary when starting and online business. Remember we want to drastically reduce on the initial investment and running overheads. The offline business hosting can be considered once you start generating income. In the meantime, this business model will be based on delivery at the customers premises and mostly based and hosted online.
Online Business Hosting (Website/Web shop Hosting)
The success of an online business is on the reliability of the web hosting. If you have very efficient web server, then your business can be guaranteed to open 24 hours a day throughout the year. Web hosting or web space or web server is where you store your website and emails. Once you create your website (web shop), you will need to host it on the web server for the world to find it. You also need a space where you can store the email messages that your clients send.
A good web host should have the following:
- Enough web space and bandwidth.
- Have Cpanel (Control Panel to manage the hosting)
- Have unlimited databases (MYSQL is preferred)
- Have unlimited email accounts hosting capability.
- Should be reliable. Have a 99 percent uptime
- Have ability to create sub domains
- Up scalable web hosting for future expansion
- Backup services (At least weekly backups if not daily)
- Should be affordable.
- Great support in case of downtime.
If you need a good web hosting service, you could get it at www.adea.co
It’s always advisable to get hosting from the same person who will register your domain name. This ensures that the integration between the domain name and web hosting is seamless. It also reduces on your annual cost of maintaining the website and a one point on contact for support.
The next session about Business identity and communication