Getting Started in an Online Business- Part 1.

This is the first post in a series about running your own online business. We aim to cover all aspects of running a successful website.
In this post, I'm going to cover Hosting.

Hosting is basically where you put your website.

Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) might supply you with some webspace on which you can put a website. This is usually part of the deal for having the account, so you don't pay extra for it.
Sadly, most free webspaces come with a lot of restrictions, which apart from the most simple of sales pages, do not lend themselves to the use of eCommerce.
And if your site becomes very popular, you will soon fall foul of the ISP's bandwidth limits and your site will either become temporarily unavailable, or you'll find a huge addition to your ISP's monthly bill.

For any serious website used for Online Marketing and eCommerce, you'll need an independent host. These are specialist companies that provide hosting services for commercial websites.
They are not very expensive - typically $10 per month - sometimes even less. However, the cheaper ones might not provide such a good service or support.

For most online marketing sites, you will need PHP and CRON services provided by your host. This lets you run scripts that will automate your business. After all, we don't want to work for a living, do we?
Don't worry if you don't know what PHP and CRON are. You don't need to know just yet. Just make sure that you have them.

Personally, I use HostGator for my hosting. Since I've been with them (more than one year now), I've never had a site become unavailable. Their support is very good and they even have online chat style support. Furthermore, for just $7.95 per month I can host unlimited domains (subject to the available disk space).
I also use a couple of other hosts, but they are actually HostGator resellers, which suggests to me that they can't be that bad!

There are many other hosting services. Google will find them for you.

Once you have your host, you will need to set up the Domain Name Servers for your domain.
But I'll cover domains in another post.