Source: https://www.todhost.com/knowledgebase/782/Web-Hosting-Options-to-start-your-online-business.html

Getting a website in Nigeria has become very easy today. Some two decades ago, it was not so easy to register a domain name and begin an online business in Nigeria. All that has changed and in simple steps and very few clicks, you can begin an online business with your own website in Nigeria today.

The internet represents a huge potential for business growth and entrepreneurship. But one key advantage of the internet over real world business is that you do not require a physical location for your business to commence. You can build trust and excel in sales and profit making operating a business on the web. The Linda Ikeji's blog and Nairaland forum are two classic examples of business successes that and solely dependent on the web with no need for a physical office.

To begin a business on the web, you require a website. To get a website, you need to host it online. There are several options for hosting a website and we will take a look at them and suggest which the best is for every moment.

Please note that this article is introductory and so does not go into the technical details of each of the web hosting options.

What is Web Hosting

Think of web hosting as getting a space on the internet to enable you upload files and conduct your online business. So if you have been able o generate an idea, developed the idea into a sellable concept, you will need to get a web hosting space on the internet to be able to promote your idea to internet users within a locality or to the global user community.

Design Your Website

To run a website on the internet, you will need to come up with an attractive web page designed to build trust and make usability simple. To be successful on the increasingly competitive world of the internet today, you must ensure that your website loads fast, is easy to navigate and providing sufficient information to help or provide the needed answers and solutions to your visitors. You also need to be very skillful in developing a call to action button on your website especially if you have some products to sell or want your visitors to provide you with some extra information like subscribing to your newsletter.

If you are designing on localhost, you can defer activating your web hosting account until after you complete your web deigning. If you want to design online, then you will have to get a web hosting account in place before you can start. In designing your website, keep these salient points in mind:

Ensure that you enable your cache system especially if you are running a content management system like WordPress, Joomla or ecoomerce based solutions like Magento and OpenCart.
Take website security very seriously maintaining a safe password practice and updating your website software to keep up with their latest release. Outdated software has been the source of many website hack or exploitation. This can be avoided by maintaining your website to keep up with latest updates and releases.
Take extra security steps to protect your website by using the IP deny, allow rule to protect sensitive files and directories. Directories that need protection will include the admin folder, the module and plugin folder, the components folder and template folder. Recently, for a content management system, it has been useful to protect all folders from regular access because hackers have become very smart and keeping them at bay using the IP deny rule is a good way to stay safe.
Change default admin username. With most CMS, the default username is the same and usually it is called "admin". Changing this to a custom username is a good idea to prevent brute force attempts to guess your password having being sure that the username is correct. In changing the default admin username, the recommended approach is to create a new user with administrator permissions , login to the website backend or admin dashboard and delete the default user.

Hosting Your Website

There are options for hosting your website. The simplest is a shared hosting service. With a shared hosting service, you use the web server with other users. What they do can affect you just as what you do can affect them. You will also be sharing your sever IP address with others. It means that if any user engages in a spammy or unwholesome activity which leads to a blacklist, all of you will be affect that are using the shared server.

A shared web hosting service is however cheap and easy to get active in simple clicks and within minutes. Take these steps to order a shared web hosting service

Browse through the web hosting plans to chose the plan that fits your needs especially in terms of disk space required, bandwidth requirement, database and emails you will need to create and any other features you will need.
Choose your preferred plan and order your web hosting service
Make applicable payments to have your order activated.
Start using your web hosting service. Once your order is activated, you will receive a "New Account Information" email which will contain the details of your web hosting order including the login details.

The other option for web hosting will include:

Reseller Hostig: This is good for those who want to resell web hosting space to their own clients or are in the business of designing and managing websites for their clients and do not want to maintain separate shared hosting accounts. This web hosting plan is best for starters and small businesses who want to un a single or just some few web hosting accounts.
Virtual Private Servers (VPS): A VPS will give you the benefit of customizing your server settings for a price lower than that of a dedicated server. VPSs are good for those who want to run certain software, set features like unlimited disk space for their web hosting clients and some other benefits.
Dedicated Server: Dedicated servers allow full customization of your server. It is however a very expensive option for web hosting and no recommended for starters..


There are other options like cloud hosting but the options explained above will be the basic you can choose from.

Hope you found this post useful, do let us know with the feedback button below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqpwZIGJCgw

Web Hosting Recommendations for Small Business