These days, everyone needs a website, even if it's only a basic
page giving contact information. That raises the question, where
to host the site?
For a basic site, webspace provided with a broadband account
may in fact be adequate. Most ISPs provide some form of webspace
allocation, although the performance and features may in some cases be
rather limited. The main issue here would be that ISP-hosted
websites do not generally support dynamic content -although they would
be fine for a collection of static pages.
For a full-featured website, it may thus be necessary to pay for
separate, specialist hosting. This need not be overly expensive.
IWR Consultancy has struck a reseller deal with
leading USA-based website-hosting company Siteground, and can provide hosting accounts for very competitive prices.
This webspace is Linux-based, and thus suits sites based on php, MySQL and similar technologies. It does not
support Microsoft-specific technologies such as ASP, although we would
not in any case advise the use of this type of platform, the
php-based technologies having proven themselves over and over again to
be of far better quality.
Space and Bandwidth allocations with this package are extremely
generous, as are the provisions for installing advanced tools and
features, in fact it's unlikely you would ever outgrow
its capabilities- at least not until your firm reaches
corporation-scale, anyway!
An important feature -and one lacking in a surprising number of hosting
accounts- is that the client has full control over the account's
settings via an online control-panel.
The email component of the package is flexible and full-featured,
an important aspect where there is the need to provide
multi-user email to a full site, rather than a simplistic single-user
system.
A side benefit of American-based hosting is the facility to register
.com and .net domains at much lower cost than a typical UK registrar
would charge. Many firms prefer a .com name as looking 'more professional' than a .co.uk
one, yet are deterred by the (unrealistically) high
registration-charges for .com domains in the UK. The answer is
simple; register in the USA and you are charged a much more
competitive rate.
If you're finding that your existing webspace is cramping your
designer's style, is slow, or not reliable, then please ask about
pricing.