Small businesses require reliable web hosting services to ensure existing and potential clients are able to locate them easily via popular search engines. New companies cannot operate profitably and successfully without dedicated hosting services for their domains. They require the following services from the hosting company:

Dedicated Servers
Web hosting providers should run your website on dedicated servers that operate on either Linux or Windows operating systems. Such servers will guarantee users full access to your site with optimum up time.

You might have spent heavily on design and customization of your domain, but an unreliable host can cause its demise. Online users do not waste time on sites that take ages to load and respond. You might end up losing a substantial number of potential customers and clients besides denting the credibility of your business.

Round the Clock Monitoring and Security
Online businesses do not shut their doors but serve worldwide customers and clients day and night. It is therefore essential to have a web hosting company that monitors domains functionality and security concerns round the clock.

Full time Technical Support
Even the most advanced technology goes haywire at times and requires repair and configuration by experts. Small online businesses have to shoulder this risk during their operations.

Nonetheless, web hosting companies should keep disruptions at a bare minimum, and deal with incidences forthwith. The hosting company should offer twenty-four hour support services for the website. Ideal providers are available at all times even during holidays, which ironically are the busiest days for online businesses.

Back up Services
A reliable web hosting company offers complete back up facilities for your server, website and database files. Back up is part of baseline security measures that enable swift restoration of your site in case of a mishap. It can take more time to restore your website from a remote server than from the hosts computers.

Numerous small businesses rely on the internet to sustain their upkeep. Web hosting services are critical to the success of such businesses. They are responsible for operating and maintaining the website on a round the clock basis. Hence, they must offer services such as dedicated servers, monitoring and security, and twenty-four hour support services for clients websites.

Dedicated hosting · dedicated server · UK web hosting · Web Hosting · web hosting company

One of the critical aspects of ensuring success for any business is to control costs. This point is infinitely magnified when you are the owner / manager of a small business.

And given that one of the major costs for small businesses is attributed to recruitment, for those using external employment agencies, this can be crippling.

According to the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development, the average staff turnover for UK companies is almost 16%. This means that for a company of 20 employees, you’ll have to pay out around £20K in recruitment costs alone (ignoring the cost of training new staff and the loss of productivity while they get up to speed with their responsibilities).

And unlike bigger and established companies, when cash runs short for small businesses, the consequences can be much more devastating. For small businesses, their bank covenants tend to be a lot more fragile.

So, how do you cut the cost of recruitment?

The simple answer is to go digital and exploit social media.

Let’s start with your own website. Do you have a ‘Work for us’ option on your website? If not, add it today and encourage visitors to your website to send you their CV. It is simple and does not cost you anything. As a web hosting company looking after 1000s of websites, this is the single biggest omission that we see on small business websites.

Now, let’s move on to social media. Do you have a Facebook and Twitter account? If not, set it up today – it takes just minutes and there are tools to help even the most novice of users to create pages quickly and efficiently. Once done, ensure you add the ‘Work for us’ option.

Remember, your web hosting company should also be able to give you free advice to help you build your presence on social media. (In fact, feel free to call Freezone’s web hosting team – just don’t tell them that I sent you!)

Then, join the professional network LinkedIn. It’s free and it allows you to connect to other like minded professionals as well as create / join special interest professional groups. Again, ensure you create a full and complete profile including links to your website.  LinkedIn is a key source for professionals looking for jobs as well as for advertising vacancies – at the last count there were some 70m members of the network.

Finally, join reed.co.uk, the only free job board in the UK. You can create an account and advertise your vacancies absolutely free.

Clearly, for some things, there are no ways to avoid costs. For recruitment, however, you have a number of choices before picking up the phone to a costly employment agency.

Facebook · Recruitment · Recruitment for small businesses · Social Media · Twitter · Web Hosting

On the eve of the football World Cup, flat screen TV manufacturers and retailers are emerging as some of the early winners of this most commercial of sporting events.

And while the nation’s joy watching England lift the Cup would be as deep as the colours on your 50 inch plasma, there will be many sharing the same joy on something rather small – a laptop or an iPad.

Certainly there are more and more of us choosing to watch TV on our computers. Indeed, the BBC iPlayer reached a milestone of 100 million requests in a month last November and has subsequently gone to on exceed that mark.

The success of BBC iPlayer, ITV player and 4 on Demand has also started a debate amongst media owners and internet service provides about who pays for the increasing demand on bandwidth.

Certainly, as a web hosting company, it is an important issue for us and for our customers and one that we hope the main telecoms and media owners will be able to resolve amicably.

In the meantime, if you plan to watch Rooney and the boys on the small screen, make sure you have sufficient bandwidth to avoid your screen freezing up at the crucial moment. You might want to talk to your broadband supplier today.

Bandwidth · Web Hosting

Email has now firmly replaced snail mail both a business communication tool as well as a social communication tool. I mean, when did you last put pen to paper to write a letter to a customer or a client, or auntie Sue for that matter?!

Over the last few years, direct mail too has been dramatically cut to be replaced with email marketing. However, while companies have spent money on securing great domain names and reliable web hosting for their websites, there still seems to be a scatter gun approach to email marketing. And this despite the one-to-one nature of email marketing.

To help you implement best practice in email marketing, here are our top 5 tips:

1. Target your audience with care

Whether you build your own email list or buy it from outside, make sure it’s ‘opted in’.  Anything else is unlikely to produce any results and, in fact, is likely to cause more damage to your business by being perceived as spam

2. Make sure content / offer is relevant

Relevancy is key. Whether it’s a newsletter or an offer led marketing message, ask yourself…is it relevant to my audience? If in doubt, change the content / message.

3. Make your call to action clear

Once you’ve sorted out the target audience and your offer, make sure that your call to action is clear – what do you want your audience to do? Is it to visit your website? Buy or try a product? Whatever the call to action, make it explicit.

4. Don’t bombard your audience

What’s the right frequency of contact with your audience? Daily, weekly, monthly? Build an understanding of your audience – in fact, ask how often they would like to hear from you. Too frequently and you’ll be regarded as spam. Too infrequent and you could lose impact

5. Make sure your email reaches its target

There is no point to a highly targeted email that never actually reaches its destination. If your web hosting company’s servers are black listed, your email would be marked as spam and is unlikely to reach its intended recipient. Ensure your web hosting company is white listed. Ask them about how they maintain their white listed status.

This is really a brief introduction to effective email marketing – we’ll pick this topic up again in the future. In the meantime, contact your web hosting company for more advice and hopefully some simple tools to help you with sending out bulk emails.

Domain · domain name · Email Marketing · Hosting · Web Hosting

The online fashion retailer ASOS recently posted a 35% increase in sales for the financial year ending March 2010. This at a time when the UK and most of the rest of the world has struggled through the recession and when the UK economy is still somewhat reluctant to show any real appetite for growth.

What’s more, ASOS’s success comes at a time when many of its competitors including household brands such as Next, French Connection and M&S are still facing difficult trading conditions.

So what’s the secret of success for ASOS?

Well, it has a great product offering at exceptional prices. Critically, it has a ‘store on every town / city’. That is to say, it is a pure online retailer with a global presence. In fact, ASOS has achieved a market cap of over £450m since its launch in 2000.

A lot of this success has been apportioned to the company’s pure online status. As well as a lower barrier to entry, the internet allows companies to be a lot cleverer and effective with their marketing.

Selling online

Now, while we don’t suggest that getting your business online will turn you into an instant multi-million pound business, what we are saying is that achieving online success is not the preserve of corporates with large budgets.

In fact, with easy access to web hosting services in the UK, selling your products / services online is far easier and quicker than you might think.

Keep it simple – use ecommerce templates

Rather than investing significant amounts in bespoke web development, you can start selling online using a simple ecommerce template costing around £100 per year, available from most UK web hosting companies. What’s more, most web hosts will throw in a free domain name too.

Most ecommerce templates also come with free web hosting – at least that’s the case with most UK web hosting companies. Importantly, as the name suggests, ecommerce templates are designed for people with little or no knowledge of actually building websites allowing you to start selling online while keeping costs of creating an ecommerce website to a minimum.

So start selling online the easy way with ecommerce templates. And remember to ask your web host for free web hosting and free domain name. Good luck!

Domain · domain name · Ecommerce · Hosting · UK web hosting · website template