Web Hosts Becoming Website Package Providers
We’re kicking off a new category of focus and taking a look at Online Business and web hosting. If you’re online, you’re doing some form of business (unless it’s just for a hobby), so we’ll take a look at some successful business models, web entrepreneurs, and other pieces of the online business success model.
I wondered how long it would take for web hosts to figure out that it’s not about disk space. That it’s not about bandwidth, the number of emails you can have, or the number of hosted domains — all of which keep increasing. It’s about setting up entrepreneurs to do business online. And that means offering a dynamic website package is primary, while the hosting features are secondary.
Why start from a blank page when you can work with a dynamic website framework set-up and ready for customization?
Consider Advanced Internet Technologies (AIT Inc.) a ten-year old company which just announced (Feb. 2008) the offering of “Instant Portals” that are designed “to help companies quickly and easily create an online presence.”
Bravo… with a note of caution. First, the Bravo: AIT gets it. People starting an online business can get excited about their ready-made online web business package. Why start from a blank page when you can work with a dynamic website framework set-up and ready for customization?
Now, the note of caution: just what is a web “portal,” and should it cost you in the neighborhood of $1,000? AIT says that their portals are hosted Web applications with a rich feature set, allowing for Web based access and management from anywhere, without depending on a large costly IT staff. Ok, but what does that mean? If you visit the AIT site, there are three online demos, one for a web store, a job board, and a social networking site. Now I get it — AIT is providing a few Contact Management System (CMS) solutions like the free open source scripts most of their competitors already provide. Other hosts already offer free Open Source programs like Joomla, Drupal, WordPress and other CMS solutions to drive your website, along with at least OSCommerce as a “web store” option.
So, my thought is that while AIT is definitely leading a trend toward focusing on website package solutions. So far so good. But if they are charging anything at all for the examples in their demos, you’d do better to find another host and use a trusted open source script as your start-up framework. In either case you’ll need to customize the “portal” CMS with your own logo, branding, headers, and navigation structure that serves your online business mission. That will be worth at least $1,000 in creative and programming costs. But you should get the basic CMS script for free.
Above, WebFaddsHosting.com offers the Elefante Installer package — a FREE PHP web application services installer with over 30 scripts to choose from for dynamic websites including WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal.
There are a lot of good web hosts out there, and I thought I’d put in a plug for our sister hosting business — WebFaddsHosting.com. It’s famous for world-class service with over 55,000 customers in 30 countries, and data centers in the US and England. And, right now there are some free domain name specials. Oh, and there’s over 30 scripts to build your CMS website with easy installation included free. Then plug in a template (WordPress, or Joomla offer hundreds of free templates), and you’re off to doing Online Business. Good luck — let us know how it turns out.
About the Author: Scott Frangos is Managing Editor for WebHelperMagazine.com, and writes the OpenSourceWebMaster.com Blog here. He also builds dynamic Blog and CMS websites with WordPress for WebFadds.com and is a college level instructor for Graphics and WebMaster subjects.
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Written by: Scott Frangos
This entry was posted on Saturday, March 1st, 2008 at 8:00 am and is filed under Online Business, Web Help. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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