Small business: up to speed on domain hosting?

I’ve encountered a number of clients who have been paying for domain registration and hosting with no idea of what a competitive price would be. As a result, many of them have been paying twice as much as they should.

To make things worse, they were receiving less than half of what they should have been receiving. By this I mean such things as storage, emails, server speed etc., as well as online tools for account management and tools to manage their site.

How did that happen?

The reasons for this are simple: lack of knowledge and lack of awareness of how everything digital is constantly changing. Some of these businesses first put up sites years ago. At the time, they probably were getting competitive prices.

But time “culls the herd,” so to speak and hosting companies either grew or did not. Some remain but have changed focus – perhaps they’re more enterprise oriented and less small business and personal site oriented.

Whatever the reasons, some companies are no longer competitive, at least from the perspective of a small business. So here two suggestions:

• Review your domain hosting plan: find out what you are paying and what you are getting.
• Compare your plan against what other companies offer: do a simple Google search (‘compare domain hosting‘) and get a general sense of a competitive price/package; ask others what companies they are using and what they are paying.

Be cautious, however. The best price isn’t always the best price. If a price is out of whack with what the rest of the industry is offering, be careful. Have someone you can trust, and who is informed, review what is offered and make some suggestions and recommendations.

Keep everything simple

You want things to be easy and you don’t want them to consume more time than necessary. You don’t want to have to go to school to learn programming languages and web site design. What you want is to have everything simple. So look for tools for managing your site.

• Do they have account management tools online? (such as, upgrade package, add new email, add new domain, profile info, add feature etc.) (Believe it or not, I’ve seen some that do not.)
• Does your domain host offer an easy to use site building tool? This would include templates you can use to create your site, an easy online interface where you can quickly and simply add text and images.
• Do they support WordPress? Using a site building tool like WordPress is a simple way to build a site and manage the content you put online. (It began as a blog builder but has evolved into a tool for building web sites.)

Take note: If you go with WordPress, you can build the site yourself (not recommended for most) or have someone build the site for you then, once in place, hand off the content management to you. Once in place, it is relatively easy to use – just make sure whoever builds your site walks you through it.

In a nutshell, find a good, competitive balance of price, package and simplicity. The first step is to review what you have and what is available. Without information, you can’t make good decisions and your money can be wasted.