OVERVIEW

Technology is a queer thing; it brings great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other.

C.P.Snow

There are a multitude of web-hosting services (a third party that sells you space on its web servers) available. A majority of small e-commerce businesses will contract with a web-hosting service rather than use an in-house server.

Your web-hosting decision is one of the most important decisions you make when starting an e-commerce business. That is because a good web-hosting service provides a place where your site can reside and operate quietly and efficiently in the background. But, if you don t do your research and perform proper due diligence, you might choose the wrong hosting service. The trick is to find the right match between what your e-commerce site needs and what the web-hosting service offers.

In your quest for the right hosting service, start with the basics how good, how reliable, and how industrial-strength is your potential host s connection to the Internet? Then check out what other services are offered to enable your e-commerce business to have more functionality.

As you shall learn, there are a multitude of web-hosting business models and options available to an e-commerce business. Because there are so many hosting choices, you must decide what your own web-hosting requirements are before venturing forth. This allows you to narrow your shopping down to just a few hundred rather than thousands of choices. Let s first look at the various web-hosting...