10 Point Checklist to Get Your Business Website Running

Starting a web-based business, or putting your established business online requires more thorough research than if you were putting up a simple, personal website. Here is a checklist of items that you need to explore before your site goes live.

1. What kind of customer service does your web host provide?

If you are going to take good care of your customers, you need a web host who takes good care of you. It isn't good enough to just cross your fingers and hope that your site never crashes. You need to know at the outset that you have better than adequate customer and technical service. If you go with a company because of price, but are hesitant to call their customer service because they are slow, surly, or incompetent, your stress when problems occur will be magnified. Running a business is hard. You need the peace of mind of knowing your questions will be answered and your problems will be fixed.

2. What kind of standard features does a web host offer?

As costs drop and hosting plans become more generous, more features go from being options to being standard, just like with cars. You should expect your host company to provide at a minimum POP email accounts, a webmail interface, and an FTP site so you can rapidly upload content to your server. The email service will allow you to receive messages in your email program (like Outlook), and the webmail interface will allow you and your employees to look at email from any computer connected to the Internet, which can be very useful for those who travel a lot.

3. How much disk space and bandwidth should I get?

Any web host worth its salt will offer you basic packages with adequate disk space and bandwidth. In fact, it is more likely that you will be allotted more than you'll ever need, unless your site provides content requiring lots of memory and bandwidth, such as video or audio downloads. You can get a rough idea of how much disk space your website will need by adding up the sizes of all the text, image, video, and audio files you plan to put on it. Clarify with the web host company that you will be allowed to upgrade to more space later if you need it.

4. Will I get secure pages for processing sales online?

This is more likely nowadays, as hosting services improve and come down in price. But you should ask anyway. You'll need something called Secure Socket Layer (SSL)

capability or Secure HTTP (S-HTTP). These two protocols are encryption programs for transmitting private data over the Internet. Internet addresses that require an SSL connection begin with https:// rather than http://

Secure HTTP, or S-HTTP is designed to send individual messages securely rather than large quantities of data. Both S-HTTP and SSL are standard protocols, and it's best if your web hosting provider offers both.

5. What programming language and operating system does the host company use?

You need to find out if the provider supports not only HTML, but also programming languages like ASP, Php, or Java, among others. If you bought the scripts you plan to use, make sure the web host supports the programming language in which they are written. Additionally, some scripts require certain operating systems on the host provider's server, operating systems like Linux or Windows. Make sure your host company supports the one you need.

6. Will my site be able to handle heavy web traffic?

Usually the answer is yes. But if you are planning on web pages that could draw massive numbers of page hits, you might want to clarify how well your provider handles such incidents. We've all heard of sites that, for some reason or another, suddenly receive millions of hits and crash the server they're hosted on. Popularity is great, but if it takes out your server, your customers or readers might go elsewhere.

7. Do I want to have a database on my site?

If you do, make sure your hosting package includes a database like MySQL, PostgreSQL, Access, or SQLServer. Some host providers also include tools for database management like phpMyAdmin, which is a tool used with MySQL databases.

8. Can I tweak my site by using a control panel?

A control panel allows the webmaster to update personal information, change passwords, and set spam filter settings, as well as allowing webmasters to add new users, subdomains, add-on domains and aliases. Additionally, it lets the server administrator edit templates, and keep an eye on server usage. Remember: when it comes to your business's website, ignorance is not bliss.

9. How does the host provider handle subdomains and redirects?

Your hosting plan must allow you to create subdomains if you plan to have them. If you plan to have multiple domain names all pointing to the same site, you need to make sure your host allows this. You should also be able to create redirects.

10. Does my host provider support Microsoft FrontPage extensions?

If your host provider supports Microsoft FrontPage, you can set up a connection between the Microsoft FrontPage on your computer and your web account on the server. FrontPage is part of the Microsoft Office Suite, and it is used for creation and management of web pages. FrontPage automatically generates HTML code for you, making it so you don't have to know much about HTML to create a web page. FrontPage is widely used because it is considered easier to use than other website creation programs. If you plan to use it, check and make sure your hosting company supports it.