Knowing what to look for when looking for small business web hosting can greatly help your chances of success in your online business. In the fast-paced world of business, there are many ways to advertise your company. Arguably the biggest way to increase sales in a cost effective manner is by having an online presence. Having a corporate or business web site both to provide information to existing clients, and to attract more potential customers by way of the search engines is essential nowadays to survival of businesses in competitive fields. Moreover, knowing the type of web hosting for small business you need will help you greatly down the road in terms of hidden costs and overhead, site loading speed and features.

Since your web site is your first contact with visitors on the internet, it is imperative that your ecommerce web site hosting provides the following:

High server uptime, at least 99%% overall uptime on average.

PHP support (the newest stable version)

MySQL databases. Most businesses will require at least 3-4 if not more, so your host should provide at least this many with any web hosting package.

CGI

Over 50 POP email accounts

Webmail (in case you do not wish to use a client side email program)

Sufficient bandwidth. 20 GB is sufficient for most small business, and this amount should be increased in relation to the amount of traffic you receive.

Sufficient space. Very few companies realistically use more than 1 GB of web space.

Customer support ticket system with reasonable response time