Simple Website Hosting For Small Businesses
Justin Hunter
Concept: SEO and AIO for small businesses looking to host their sites. They don’t have dev resources and may have simple HTML files
A small business website can help you stand out from your competition if done right. While business websites are nothing new, the way these websites—and therefore the businesses behind them—get discovered is constantly changing. And as technology continue to adapt and improve, it often gets more complicated. That includes website hosting.
Let’s explore website hosting for small businesses and focus on getting these websites up the easy and inexpensive way.
What is website hosting
A website is a digital information booth for your business. It provides details about your services, your team your history, how to contact you, and so much more. But getting that information in front of people requires that website to be “hosted” somewhere.
Just like you might host a friend for dinner, a website hosting provider will invite your website in and allow it to stay. Unlike a dinner guest, your website can stay as long as you want and as long as the host provides its services. The host itself is a company that makes servers available with the specific intention of putting websites on them so the rest of the world can access those websites.
Two decades ago, website hosting was much simpler. You would run a file transfer protocol application on your computer, move your website files into the application, and the application would send them to your website hosting provider. Today, in many cases, hosting a website requires a developer’s assistance.
That’s not how the web was supposed to be. Fortunately, there’s an easier alternative to website hosting that looks and feels a lot more like the simplicity of twenty years ago.
How to build a business website
If you have the ability to write HTML, building a business website is simply a matter of how much time you want to dedicate to it. With the right skills, you can create any website you want. Alternatively, you can find many templates online that give you a basic starting point and will allow you to customize the look and feel of the HTML to match your company.
But what if you don’t know how to write HTML?
Don’t worry, there are options. Let’s explore three of the many options available to you.
Freelance marketplaces
Servers like Fiverr and Upwork make it easy to find people who are willing to build your website to your specifications for reasonable rates. Here are five additional marketplaces that can help you find someone to build your business website:
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Toptal - Known for its quality and screening process for freelancers
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Freelancer.com - More in line with Fiverr and Upwork
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Behance - Generally known for higher quality and higher prices
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Guru - More in line with Fiverr and Upwork
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Arc - Known to produce high-quality freelancers
Freelance marketplaces are low commitment and usually have fast turnaround times. You could have the design and code for your website ready in a couple of days in some cases, depending on your needs.
Hiring a web developer
If you think your website will need ongoing changes, constant maintenance, and more complicated features, you may want to hire a web developer. This could be a full-time hire or a part-time hire. While a freelancer is going to be lower commitment, hiring a developer doesn’t have to break the bank. Many developers will work similarly to freelancers but on longer contracts with set rates and expected hours.
If you go down the hiring path, make sure you have enough work to justify the commitment. A simple website that gets your name out there can be managed by a freelancer easily. Updates can be managed by a freelancers as well. However, ongoing custom changes that happen frequently might be better suited for a part-time or full-time employee.
Using AI
This is an under-explored option unless you are working in the tech space. AI has changed the way we work. It is now very easy to create a high-quality website in minutes using AI. I wrote about how you could do so here and here. Let’s look at three tools that make make this process painless.
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v0 - A purpose-built AI tool for generating websites and web apps
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Claude - The general purpose chatbot works remarkably well at creating websites (it will even show you a preview of the site!)
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Replit - Slightly more technical and similar to v0, Replit allows for more complex creations
One of the tricks you’ll want to use for each of these (in most cases) is to ask the system to provide you a single HTML file that has all of the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript necessary for the site to work. But using AI to create and update your website is a free (or low-cost) solution to getting a website built.
How to host your website
So, you have a website but now you need to get it online. As mentioned before, the solutions for this have grown in complexity over the years. Fortunately, there are solutions that take a page from the way the web used to be. Orbiter is one of those solutions.
The first step is to sign up for a free Orbiter account. You can do so here. Once you’ve signed up, you’ll see the dashboard has some template options, or you can click the Upload Site button. Click that and you’ll see a modal that will allow you to select the files for your website.
If you used the AI route and have a single HTML file, or if you hired someone and they gave you a single HTML file, select that option. Otherwise, select the folder option and choose the folder with all of your website options. Then, give your site a subdomain (something like yourbusinessname.orbiter.website). Click Create and your website will be uploaded and online in seconds.
If you want to add a custom domain to your site, Orbiter makes this simple as well. But you have a site online and all it took was an upload and a click. Simple!
Conclusion
Business websites are important, but getting one made can be confusing. Getting one hosted can be complicated. This guide walks you through strategies to simplify both sides of the process.