• Wy do I need a website?
• Isn't it expensive?
• What is "Web Hosting"?

A website can be an invaluable tool for potential customers to find out where you are and what you have to offer, and for existing customers to check opening times and contact details at any time, regardless of whether you are open for business at the time or not. It can also be a very useful tool for you to communicate to your customer base in a very efficient way. Any business that does not have at least a basic web presence, of a basic info and a contact page for instance, should consider doing so for the reasons outlined above.

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Building and maintaining a web-site is certainly en expense, but that isn't to say it needs to be expensive. If you think about how many people you will reach out to with a website and compare the cost to your anual advertising expenses it seems a very reasonable investment. Once a basic web-site is up and running it costs very little to keep it there.

While getting your own web site up and running is an initial expense, it needn't necessarily be expensive, and once it is up there the only maintenance costs are paying for the hosting space where it will live, and periodic updates to the content to keep it up to date. If you compare it to the cost of advertising it isn't much at all and it will give your customers that important first contact point, and a reference point to check for updates and changes to your business. See our Price Guide for details.

In addition to the above each page will be built to conform to html standards and checked for validation conformance to W3C Recommendations (try clicking the W3C icon which appears at the bottom of each validated page). The reason for all of this is to ensure that each page will be of a standard that will render consistently and reliably in as many different browsers as possible, thus reaching more of your target audience.

Simply put, web hosting is a place for your website to 'live'. Once your site is designed and ready to go online it needs to sit on a 'Server' - a computer that stores the site and serves it up when a web browser makes a request to see the site. This server is known as your site's host - hence the term web-hosting.

You generally can't host your website from your own computer because then when your computer is not on or doesn't have an internet connection people will not be able to access your site. Even if you have a broadband connection and your computer is always on, chances are your connection will not provide enough bandwidth for you to surf the web and serve your website to a potential world of people.

Web hosting varies wildly from free services, which can be good to begin with if you are on a very tight budget, to very expensive - and often overpriced services offering lots of gimmicks to justify the cost.

I can only recommend what I have used my self, and that is currently bluehost. I have been with them since 2003 and in that time they have grown from a fledgling company offering a quality hosting service to an ever growing and popular one offering - well, a high quality hosting service! Even with their astonashing growth rate over the past few years they still provide an excellent service and customer support is also brilliant, having recently had an online chat support system - this can make all the difference.

If you choose to buy web hosting through me it is bluehost who will host your site. They are priced competitively and offer excellent value for money, and my setup fee is modest so there is no need to worry about getting the best deal out there.