Popular Web Hosting Services for Your eBay Store

By Marsha Collier

If you're looking for a Web-hosting service for your online eBay business, before deciding on a company, you should check out the different services available. Here are some of the better-known Web hosting companies:

ReadyHosting

ReadyHosting is a little guy who’s worked hard. The company has been hosting Web space since June 2000 and is a CNET Certified Award Winner. More than 150 new sites sign up with the service each day. Sites are hosted on servers running state-of-the-art software, and each site comes with a Cart32 e-commerce shopping cart. Cart32 integrates directly into Microsoft Expression Web (if you’ve got it), holds inventory, validates credit cards, and more. For details, check out the ReadyHosting site.

Web.com

Web.com is a big company with big, sophisticated equipment, and it hosts a bunch of the big guys on their own private servers. Web.com has been in the hosting business since 1995 and hosts sites for millions of small and medium-sized businesses.

For little guys, Web.com offers shared hosting, and that’s probably what you’ll be using for quite a while. With shared hosting, your site resides with others on a single server, sharing all resources. Web.com even offers an eBay Store integrator at no extra cost in the basic package.

If your Internet sales gross more than $100,000 a year, you might have to look into dedicated hosting, in which your site is on a server of its own and is managed by the technical experts at your hosting company.

One of the best features of the company is its 24/7 toll-free technical support: Its online support gives extensive advice on how to solve problems on your own.

Microsoft Office Live Small Business

If Web.com is big, Microsoft is gargantuan; it’s the leader in everything related to personal computing (as if you didn’t know that). To grab a piece of the e-commerce market, Microsoft is making a strong push with its improved Office Live Small Business Center (formerly bCentral) site — which has always been a home for business Internet utilities — and has now come full circle to hosting Web sites and promoting e-commerce.

Free Web Sites from Microsoft’s Office Live.

Office Live's goal is to get all small businesses on the Web — for FREE. Yes, free. The free Web site is a good deal — but realize that down the line, when you want to add the e-commerce tools you're offered, it’s going to cost you. Availing yourself of the Web hosting is an easy procedure. You can find out the details of Microsoft's current offerings at the Office Live Small Business site.

Office Live Small Business handles everything you need — free templates, design, and Domain setup. Your domain name is free for the first year; after that, you will be charged $14.95 annually. Your domain name will automatically renew each year unless you cancel prior to the renewal date.

Yahoo! Web site services

When you subscribe to one of Yahoo!’s Web-hosting plans, you can access their free design software, which allows you to be up and running with the basic site quickly. Thank goodness you don’t have to know any HTML to use it. The download includes access to more than 300 stock templates that you can customize any way you want.

Yahoo’s award-winning Web-hosting services.

If you don’t want to use the online tool, you can use an HTML editor to design your site. Check out their award-winning offerings at the Yahoo! Small Business Web site.