Choosing a service provider

Hi there,

A friend of mine is starting her own business distributing athletic hot and cold wraps with a partner and asked me to design a low budget website for her. This is the first website that I have designed for business purposes. To begin with, there will be no online shopping ... it will be just an information, order by email or phone, type of site. My question is ... what do I advise her in terms of which package to sign up for when she chooses a service provider, because I have had no experience with small business sites, and do not know what size of bandwidth she will need. I don't want to get her signed up, and then find out she should have gone for a bigger package.

Any advice?

Web-hosting? sevice provider is more ISP.
site5 and wesh are always good places to go for hosting.
and if you need more.. you just pay a little extra

if you were on about ISPs, that would mean the client has their own server,
and would run it from there
but it's not recommended

The majority of small web sites do not need packages with more than say 1GB of space and 5GB-10GB of bandwidth - these are maximum limits for small web sites, particularly ones that do not transfer files much themselves or do not include much multimedia.

Thanks. I have only done one website before - for my daughter's gymnastics club, and this one is a small business, so I wasn't sure how
the traffic they might experience translates into size on the internet.
I will take your advice and suggest they get the basic package ... I guess they can upgrade later if the business takes off.

PS to AlexGeek: I'm still pretty inexperienced and sometimes get the terminology wrong - I did mean a web host I guess. Sorry.

I think this should be moved to the Hosting and Domains forum as that is most suited.

My two cents.. I agree with Alex and i recommend Site5.com. Thier $5 plan is fantastic and will have enough space and bandwidth anybody will need.

Good luck

Dont worry about it
Service providers would be if you wanted to host it yourself, but it's much more reliable to go with a hosting company, such as a site5.
If you check the site you can see how ridiculously cheap it is

Hey, I checked out site5.com and it looks really impressive. It also includes emails, which my friend wants for her website. I will definitely
suggest that she check it out. My website is well on its way, and I will
submit it for critique as soon as it is done. Thanks for your suggestions.

Most host oversell their product to attract newbie for their hosting plan, so beware of such host.
If you or your client is new to hosting then you should look for a host who can provide you 24x7 free technical support with affordable rates. Initially shared hosting will work for you but once your business get more ppopular and start getting huge traffic then you may think of VPS or semi-dedicated hosting it all depends on the traffic and your site.

Before signing you should also look for features of your chosen plan and should compare it with others.
If you are looking for cpanel hosting with excellent 24x7 support and 30 day's moneyback guarantee you can try service from the site in my sig.

Webmachine is based in Canada, so I would recommend a US based host, not a UK one. (Attention to detail before self plugging)

__________________
Cpanelv11 / CDP / PHP5 / MySQL5
WESH UK Web Hosting :: 0845 257 1084