Let’s get this straight before we go any further - changing from one small business web site hosting company to another is a right royal pain in the ass!

The larger or more complicated your small business website is the more important this rule becomes - try to get the right web host from the word go.

Many people new to building sites look for real budget options - the cheapest, nastiest hosting available on the planet. Then after a few months they work out why their hosting is so cheap - the server keeps on crashing so nobody can see their site, the support stinks, they’re unable to get many visitors to their site, scripts spontaneously stop working  and more

The whole situation turns into a nightmare.

Worse, many of the ultra-cheap business web site hosts go out of business very quickly as the smarter web masters take their business elsewhere. And when a web host goes bust, you lose everything.

Not good.

Luckily it’s never happened to me but I know others who suddenly started to wonder why they hadn’t seen any sales from their site for a few days to discover their web host had vanished - and with it their website.

Ouch! You better hope you backed up baby!

Appreciate that even taking a small basic site and downloading it from the Internet then finding new hosting, reuploading it, testing it to ensure everything works correctly then changing the domain name details so everyone can find your newly “rehomed” site isn’t fun - and you’re losing leads and customers every minute of the changeover.

The problem becomes a hundred times harder if, for example, you have a shopping cart script housing hundreds of products. You’ll need to reinstall and reconfigure every element of your shopping cart so it looks just like you want it to and every feature works as you need, then transfer a huge product database over.

Even worse imagine if you have a discussion forum with thousands of registered members and tens of thousands of messages all to move across to your new host (or lose all those years of discussions altogether).

It doesn’t bear thinking about.

So the moral of the story here is don’t necessarily consider just the ultra-cheap business web site hosting options. You usually get what you pay for and whilst you don’t want to be paying for services you won’t use it’s a good idea to go for a mid-range option that has the reliability to go with it and the “growing space” to handle your small business web site as it grows to maturity.