Building a website is the first step to putting your scuba diving business online but what is just as important, if not more important is the hosting of your site and your email.
In simple terms, Hosting is the bit that makes your website visible to the world and is the bit that makes sure your potential clients can contact you by email 24 hours per day, 7 days per week.
Choosing The Right Hosting Service
Unless you are an IT professional or a Network Engineer, website hosting packages can be a little bit confusing. There are lots of providers to choose from, lots of package types and lots of “jargon” to learn such as: Bandwidth, SQL, Servers, POP3, IMAP, SSL, Quotas, Data Transfer, FTP, DNS, MX Records, CNAME…the list goes on and on!
Not only do you have to put yourself in a position to learn all of this jargon and find out what it all means but you then have to try understand which of these features you need and which of these features you don’t.
Don’t Pay For What You Don’t Need
Once way that people choose a hosting package is to pick a medium or top level package on the assumption that this will cover all eventualities. On one hand this does make sense but you may not need some advanced hosting features for another 12 months (if ever), in which case you are over-paying for your hosting every month until you need the extras. Certainly hosting is not the most expensive part of being online but when you are running a business every penny matters so why pay more than you need to.
Choose Something Scale-able.
When I say scale-able I mean that the best packages are those which you can add features to and remove features from as the needs of your website dictates. There is no point paying for features you don’t need, until you need them.
Managed Hosting V Self Managed
If you are familiar with IT, choosing the features you need and the hosting provider is a little bit easier and managing your hosting account is something that will be a little bit more straight forward. If, however you are not an IT Professional it can be a daunting process. You may get recommendations from people you know or you may just take a guess based on what you think is good value.
At Dive Media Solutions we take all of the guesswork out of the equation so you can concentrate on running your scuba diving business.
What We Do To Help You
If you are new to website and email hosting our team will help you learn exactly what features you need based on the needs of your business and your website aims.
- We will take care of registering your domain name (Website Address) for you
- We will set up your email accounts (eg. yourname@yourcompany.com)
- We will walk you through configuring your PC to receive email
- We will help you set up your mobile handset or tablet to receive your emails on the go
- We will upload your website to the Internet and make it visible online 24 hours per day, 7 days per week
Depending upon where you are in the world we may even be able to take care of all of this with you, in your own office or diving center over a coffee!
My Website Is Already Online With Someone Else
This is certainly not a problem. If your website is already hosted elsewhere but you would like to take advantage of a fully managed hosting service, the Dive Media Team can work with your current provider to migrate your website and email services to our servers with the minimum amount of disruption and downtime. We will get your website up and running in it’s new home without you or your website visitors every knowing anything about it! (all at no extra cost).
This Sounds Expensive!
Not at all. Hosting should not be expensive. Making your website visible should not cost a fortune and having access to reliable email facilities should not be something that eats your online budget. The Fully Managed Hosting services from Dive Media start at $9.99 per month – That is a fully managed service for less than most “self service” off the shelf packages.
We can even arrange pricing in your own currency (depending upon where you are) and reduced costs for annual payments.
For more information about how we can help your scuba business in all aspects of fully managed hosting please feel free to contact the Dive Media Team today. We offer a free, no obligation assessment of what’s involved for you and provide full details of each step of the process. If you are happy with what we have to offer then we take care of everything so you can concentrate on running your scuba diving business!
