Starting a new business - Website setup questions

[Mustang]

After much discussion with the wife and research, we took the steps to do a new business startup so, I guess as of today I'm a new business owner. (even if in name only right now). From a career standpoint, probably the happiest I've been in a long time although, we are a long ways from here to where we want to go which would be ultimately to have a brick and mortar establishment.

We are still getting everything lined up from a business account and distribution setup so, we are several weeks away from going full out, but in the meantime my wife can do more of her Ebay thing without fearing that the black helicopters will swoop down and collect taxes. (Writing off part of the house on a business expense will be nice too).

Having said that, in going back and relooking at distributors, I noticed some distributors that previously would only deal with B&M places now opened up to Internet sites also (non-Ebay/Amazon) so, a website is in the plans now also.

A few questions -

1. Website hosting should not be confused with Website registrars correct? Or do most do both now?

2. Any factors (beyond cost/space) that should be considered? We are going to use Paypal so, I'm not sure all hosting sites interact with Paypal.

3. Do most website hosting sites have a basic setup package that you can tweak to get a store up and running?

4. Any ones to stay away from?

5. Are security measures taken by the hosting site or are there other concerns? (Am I going to wake up one day and my front page replaced with - THE ALIENS ARE COMING!!!! because I forgot to do something?)

Thanks in advance! (And thanks to Flasch for having his business thread out there where I did glean some useful information...)


(Won't give out fully what we are doing because some things may be tweaked in the coming weeks.. although, I can definitely safe that we will not be selling porn, tea or maximum football....)

[albionmoonlight]

I know nothing about web registration, so I can't help you. But good luck.

Also, it might be worth your time to see whatever options Wisconsin has for registering a business and whether you want to incorporate, become an LLC, or an LLP.

Generally, the LLC is your best option for a small business--easy, provides the same tax treatment as if you didn't do it, and protects your personal assets from liability. But your situation (and state laws) may vary.

[Oilers9911]

Many hosts do both. The company I use, pair.com also has a registrar, pairnic.com. Pair has been great for me, great support, definitely supports Paypal. If you want a good shopping cart look at RomanCart at RomanCart Shopping Cart (www.romancart.com). You can use it like a regular shopping cart and use Paypal to process payments. It has a ton of options to customize your cart and for more advanced features it's like $90/year but the basic version is free.

[Mustang]

Also, it might be worth your time to see whatever options Wisconsin has for registering a business and whether you want to incorporate, become an LLC, or an LLP.

Generally, the LLC is your best option for a small business--easy, provides the same tax treatment as if you didn't do it, and protects your personal assets from liability. But your situation (and state laws) may vary.

We had discussed with our accountant and we are an LLC.

[chesapeake]

Good luck, Mustang. I hope this adventure turns out well.

[MacroGuru]

If you are looking to sell product online through a dropship relationship or you warehouse the product, it's a fun and exciting business I have been running a couple of sites for almost 2 years now...the extra income is nice and helps cover the "fun" expenses.

[cooleyvol]

Be aware that some hosts that provide url purchase have the url registered in 'their' name, so if you change hosts, you might have trouble moving the url.

I'd advise registering at godaddy.com and just changing the nameservers on the url to point to whatever host you go with. That way, the url is yours to move as you please between hosts.

[Icy]

As coolevol, i strongly recommend to not to use your domain registrar as hosting.

The reason is that you might have hosting troubles in the future, sadly it's usual to change hosting every X years because different needs or troubles with them, and you don't want them to have any power over you because they also are your domain registrars.

Your domain is the most precious property in an online business, specially when you have worked hard on it and it becomes a successful one. Think on it like if it was your home, you wouldn't give your property title to any random person to store it.

Use a known registrar to register your domain, good ones that i use are moniker.com and godaddy.com. I have over 200 domains registered with each one and have zero problems with them.

Then for hosting, look for known companies too, probably not the cheapest way but the most reliable, that is one of the keys of a headaches free online business.

When looking for a hosting company, do some research about their reputation, google is your friend, just search for something like "hostname troubles" and you will find if that "hostname" company has a lot of complains from customers.

I would say that 70% of the hosting companies are just resellers of bigger ones. They rent the servers at the big hosting company and set their own online support, that most of the times work remotely on the servers so if there is a hardware issue you need to contact them, then they need to phone call the hosting facility and have a tech there to fix it, having that step in he middle can delay things a lot (and remember that a host server is just a PC with good hardware, but a PC that can break like your home one).

A good forum to read about hosting companies is webhostingtalk.com (http://www.webhostingtalk.com)

About interacting with paypal, it's not something related to the host but to the software you use for your online shop. Some hosting companies can offer you a ready to go online shop software with paypal integrated, you just need to edit the color scheme/logo and add your articles/prices.

About security meassures, if you rent a "managed" hosting package as you should unless you are an unix tech, they will take care of all the server upgrades and security, you just need to use a bit of common sense and basic security meassures to avoid letting doors open to hackers.

One basic thing you should look in a hosting company is true 24/7 support online or by phone, not only by the famous "tickets" that you send if you have troubles and that some joke companies do not read for like 48 hours. Be sure that you will have troubles one day, because hosting companies offer 99% of uptime, but that 1% of downtime always come in the worst moment (Murphy's laws) and when it comes, you will panic seeing your site not reacheable, and you will want inmediate support, not to submit a ticket and wait glued to your computer screen for days waiting for your issue to be fixed.

I can't recommend right now any hosting company as the ones i use do not offer good managed hosting packs, they are more about heavy bandwith usage with you taking care of the basic servers maintenance and setup, and that is not what you are looking for an online shop being a non unix tech.

About who to avoid, registerfly offer both domain registration and hosting and used to be a good and known company, but sadly they became a joke of a company and tons of their users including me could have lost all the domains because their incompetence a couple of years ago.

Feel free to ask for more advice about it. I'm not expert on setting up online shops as it's not my business, but sadly i have tried a lot of different hosting companies in my 10 years in the online business.

[Mustang]

Thanks for all the information Icy especially the forum site. There are alot of sites that review or rate hosting sites, but I wasn't sure if some of those were setup just to do good reviews for various hosting sites.

The good thing is that I'll be setting up the site, but I will really not be doing any sales on it for a bit of time so, at least I'll be able to evaluate the hosting site a little more rather than panic about sales from day 1 so...

Thanks again!

[Flasch186]

wanna sell some tea on it?

[Danny]

InMotion Hosting (http://www.inmotionhosting.com/) has very good reviews and a lot of different hosting options. They've been great for the week and a half since I signed up. I chose the $4 a month plan, but my site is only really going to be used by 40-60 people at most for the next couple years and just needed a host that I knew was going to be up all the time.