Hey mate, I know your time is valuable, so I’ll be quick here – Lets check out 7 features of a successful online business, and how your hosting is a key part of them all.
Super Easy To Use
A good host shouldn’t leave a new small business hanging. The finite details of how your website looks don’t matter much, especially in the beginning. I want to help you avoid the mistakes I made in the beginning.
Start your site using wordpress. Ipage and JustHost offer 1-click setup of WordPress. It’s not just for blogs. I don’t even have any blogs – I use wordpress to run all my sites including WebHostingBreak. It’s a serious tool and it’s completely free, and you can install it in one click… Oh, and there are thousands of beautiful themes you can download for free and upload to your site for an awesome look.
Brand Identity/Personality/Human Touch
Just make sure your site is clean-looking, easy to navigate, shows your personality 100% without trying to be dry and “professional” (in 2010, “professional” means nobody listens and it’s boring)… What people want is people.
We’re not doing oil contracts here. If you’re anything like I imagine you, you’re probably doing something unique and awesome like running a marketing agency or breeding and selling exotic bird hybrids. 
Oh, and use big buttons as calls to action to show visitors what to do next.
Pages Load Fast
When a site loads slowly, I feel like it’s sketchy/shady, and I bet my dinner and dessert that you feel the same way when you’re viewing a website. (that’s a big bet! I loveeee korean food)
iPage hosting is based in a highly secure datacenter with the latest quad and 8 core server hardware, hosted in a cluster configuration so that in case one device goes down, your site still loads from others collectively.
Attract Visitors The Smart Way
As small businesses we have to be resourceful. That means saving money by avoiding traditional marketing methods with little to no ROI (return on investment), such as billboard advertising and local ads. You deserve the same opportunity that many online marketing professionals are getting recently – Free advertising credits for Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Facebook Ads. You don’t want to ignore Facebook – I was spending over $10,000 per day on a campaign on there, with about 20-30% ROI for almost a month. It was a quick thing but it just shows if you target your audience right you can profit well on Facebook. Grab your Facebook, Google and Yahoo marketing credits when you get iPage web hosting now.
Track Which Visitor Sources Make You Money
Besides being infinitely scalabe, doing business online is awesome because you can using tracking systems like Google Analytics to see quickly and easily… EXACTLY where your sales come from. That way you can eliminate spending on ads that don’t make you money, and spend more on ads that bring in the sales/clients/revenue!
Your iPage hosting account has Google Analytics integrated so when you login to iPage, you can access your site’s statistics right there.
Site is always online
These days, I consider it ridiculous if a hosting company has downtime (where their clients’ sites go down all at the same time, for anywhere from 1 minute to 30 minutes or more, due to hardware problems). That said, I pay over $600 per month for my dedicated servers and my sites did go down for about 6 hours one time in the past 3 years. Nobody can guarantee 100% uptime, but after 5 years online I know what companies do business right and stay up 99% of the time.
Allow Customers To Submit Feedback/Testimonials
On all my websites, I encourage users to submit reviews and comments about my products and articles. Your business host should offer tools like RatePoint to allow you to collect customer and visitor feedback. Then you can listen to feedback and improve your site, target your audience more closely, and even post testimonials you might not have received otherwise.
I highly recommend you find a hosting company who is ready to provide you with the features I outlined in this list of essentials. I can also recommend iPage hosting, who also happen to be highest rated by visitors of WebHostingBreak. I feel pretty great about recommending them!
About Ian Mason
Ian Mason is the author of the Rich By Love Mastermind and an acclaimed online marketer, seminar leader and business consultant.
Ian was blessed to receive a second chance after being broke, unable to pay rent in December 2006. He discovered online marketing and began a long journey of failures and victories until he made a full-time living online.
Ian donates a portion of the proceeds from the sale of his works to bright entrepreneurs in third world countries. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with his incredible wife, Kyungri.
"Dream big, love everyone and pursue happiness!"
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