Starting an Online Business All-in-One For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Sorting Out Your Web Site Host Options

Although choosing a hosting plan can be overwhelming, after you begin researching all the options, you find that most hosts make comparing apples to apples easy. To ensure competitiveness, hosts often break down their plans into several categories. With a quick glance, you can determine whether a plan has all the elements you want.

Basic, or starter, hosting packages offer bare-bones necessities — enough to get, and keep, a simple site with minimal images up and running. When this level is all you need, you end up making your decision strictly on price. (We see it happen all the time.) What we consider to be the other forced option is when you require e-commerce capabilities. No matter what, you have to choose the plan that provides for this need. (Typically, no more than one e-commerce hosting plan is available from one source — so you need to shop around to get the best deal.) Again, when you're selecting among providers, your decision comes down to price and which e-commerce program is partnered with (or offered by) each host.

Midlevel plans usually leave the most room for uncertainty. These hosting options vary the most by both price and available features. To overcome indecision, make a list that prioritizes which items you need and which you're most likely to set up and use in the first three months of your site going live. Then again, ...