Three major issues you, as a small business owner, need to address in building a small business website is the choice of programming language, the type of web hosting to choose, and the plan of web hosting to sign up. Let’s discuss a bit on those, shall we?
Issue #1. ASP.net or PHP?
Well, Google and Facebook runs on Linux web servers and programmed using PHP; MSN.com and Bing.com runs on Windows servers. The point I’m trying to make is, ASP.net and PHP are both popular and have their own advantages and disadvantages; that being said, both are powerful, as both power some of the biggest sites on the Net today.
What you should actually do is to decide which web development language you and your team are going to build your business website upon, then we can decide which web hosting servers to use. You need to decide first, or else you will end up wasting resources trying to make things work and/or finally decide you need to migrate from one programming language to another and/or from one web hosting to another.
I made such mistake. When I started my journey in webpreneurship, I signed up with a Windows web hosting only to find that my site built on WordPress won’t be able to function well. Why? It’s because WordPress is built using PHP programming language and it should be hosted on the PHP-friendly Linux web hosting. It can run on Windows web hosting, but there are some limitations, such as the inability to use permalinks (the SEO-friendly page name, such as the one used by this article.)
Issue #2. Linux hosting or Windows hosting?
Your choice of web hosting Operating System depends on your choice of programming language. Will you and your team build your business website using PHP or ASP.net?
PHP is open source and will be able to run on any open source platform – this makes LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) hosting generally costs less than ASP.net. On the downside, almost anyone can code with PHP due to the PHP resource accessibility, making many IT managers being misled into believing that PHP is less secure than ASP.net.
ASP.net will only run on windows web hosting and as it’s not an open source programming language, most ASP.net programmers rely on MS Visual Studio editor to aid their .NET Applications development. In other words, ASP.net is not as flexible as PHP, and it’s a commercial programming language vs. the free, open source PHP.
So – is ASP.net a bad programming language ? If I answered that question with a yes, I would mislead you. I’m not saying that Windows hosting is bad. It’s all about choices, really: The programming language you use will determine the Operating System of your web servers, and vice versa. In fact, some experts recommend ASP.net if your business website is an eCommerce sites. But again, that depends on personal choices, really.
Issue #3. Shared, VPS or dedicated hosting?
If you have good resources, owning your own servers is recommended. However, this is a luxury to many of us, so leasing web servers is a good option. The big question is: Should you go for shared, VPS or dedicated hosting?
Well, if you expect your business website won’t get plenty of visitors, I suggest you to go for shared web hosting – it’s affordable, thus it will help you minimise your startup cost. Shared hosting allows you to share web server resources with others. So in a web server, you can have many user accounts.
As your business website needs more resource to take care thousands of visitors a day, you might want to consider VPS (virtual private server) hosting or semi-dedicated hosting. You will share resources, but only with several others – this will allow your business website to secure more resources to serve your business website visitors well.
You will know when you need a dedicated server hosting: Your business website is flooded with tens of thousands visitors a day and you always get warnings from your web hosting provider that VPS hosting services can no longer support such huge request.
The best advice I can give you is to start small and upgrade to better plans as your website needs more resources. Optimising your business website can avoid the need to upgrade, but for a growing business website, this will only delay things, not solving problems.
One last advice: Start things right will avoid you future problems. So be sure to spend most of your resources on deciding which programming language you will build your business website with: Is it ASP.net or PHP?
Ivan Widjaya
Small business website development