What exactly does someone want or need in a web hosting company? some needs are basic, and more features are required for a couple of types of online ventures. If your site is for personal use only, the minimum requirements are very basic. enough space to host your site, and some basic web site building tools so you don't need to buy or find a free wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) editor or learn to code html so you could use a program like notepad, learning some html is useful since sometimes you just want to find a certain line of text (code) to make a slight change on your site. for some more sophisticated features like a blog or an autoresponder would not be needed for a personal site but these items are all but necessary for an ecommerce/marketing web site. Almost all of the internet marketing guru's state that you have to have an email list that you can market to, most of them will attempt to sell you a subscription to one of the autoresponder companies, but i have yet to see any one of them tell you that almost all web hosts offer a free autoresponder as part of their basic package, perfect for someone just trying to break into the internet marketing field, and there are free programs that will send an email to everyone you choose (for example from a list collected regarding making money online). you still have to write the letters and import the list (you would have to with an autoresponder company anyway) the prices for this service vary greatly but average around $15.00 per thousand each time you send out a mailing so if you do 1 mailing per week to 3000 recipients that works out to $45.00 per week or $180.00 per month for a small list, granted the companies offer templates to help you create emails, but the bottom line is you need to write the content yourself. Recently my sister needed to find a hosting company for her online art gallery, the first thing she mentioned was having a blog, she had already paid a lot to have a web site built and the company did a great job, it was far from cheap but it's awesome, the problem was that they hosted the site, and did not offer any statistics, a blog, or anything else, they hosted the site for about 5 times what it's worth (hundreds of dollars per year) actually more if you consider what she got. so i started a search for a web hosting company that offered some pretty basic things, a blog, a mailing list to update her customers on gallery openings etc., what i found was for the same money as an inexpensive host (once you added features like stats) you could have your site hosted by a major company and save money, or at least not pay extra. I am in the process of moving my domain and web pages to them, all of the features that i paid extra for are included. Here are some of the items that they offer to make your life easier.
an email auto responder
3 different statistics programs (who is showing up at your site what interests them).
Fantastico deluxe it is a collection of scripts that install automatically things like blogs, shopping carts, polling software a lot more.
5,000 email accounts, spam filters.
backup software (backs up to your computer).
adwords (google) and yahoo advertising credits (more credit than a 1 year prepaid account would cost you).
host unlimited domains for the same price, for less than $10.00 month.
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