In this post, we will provide some recommendations for web hosting and website development for new businesses (startups, small businesses etc.)
Purchase a Domain name (Domain Registrar)
We recommend Amazon Route 53 for purchasing new domain names (new website names). It is very quick and also offers features such as Auto renewal, Transfer lock etc. Amazon Route 53 also acts as a DNS service for creating DNS records for your new website.
Hire a web developer
If you are a new business and lack a web developer in-house, we recommend that you find a web developer with good review ratings in Freelancing marketplaces such as www.Fiverr.com. You can get work completed for your digital projects such as Website development with high quality and affordable prices. A $600 to $1000 overall budget for the web developer's services is a good starting point.
Pro tip: When finalizing your web developer, please make sure that the web developer can also do the initial design/prototype of the website. https://www.figma.com/ is a popular tool for it.
Web content management system
We recommend Wordpress as the technology for building your website. It is the most widely used web content management system today.
Wordpress Theme
A theme controls the layout along with details such as appearance, font, design elements and style too. Additionally, it helps in defining the appearance of common website elements such as menus, headers and footers etc. A Wordpress theme is the "skin and design framework" for websites built using Wordpress technology.
Wordpress also offers an "administration" interface (a.k.a wp-admin) for the Wordpress ecosystem is very vast with lots of trusted 3rd party plugins etc. for SEO, security, backups, E-Commerce etc.
Elementor
A very popular Wordpress website builder and theme provider is Elementor. It even has the Pro version called "Elementor Pro" which is used for creating complex websites. The basic themes called the Hello Elementor themes are more than enough for building a great looking website for startups and small businesses. These days, we are seeing more and more Wordpress websites built using the Elementor theme.
Web hosting providers
WPEngine
We recommend WPEngine for website hosting for websites built using Wordpress. Among things that standout in WPEngine are its automated backups, automatic SSL (security certificate) renewal, automatic updates to Wordpress software and it is also reasonably priced (around $25 per month for a single website). Plus, it offers a Sandbox (testing) environment too (Non-production website).
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2 is a good alternative to WPEngine. But it requires setting up of the servers ourselves and also it requires creating an Amazon Load Balancer. The Load Balancer provides the SSL (security certificate) functionality and also helps in automatic renewal of SSL certificate for your website. Plus, you have to configure backups etc. manually for your new website incase you are not using a Wordpress plugin for backups already. Overall, hosting a website using WPEngine is much more simpler when compared with hosting in Amazon EC2. If you want more control and have a good cloud computing engineer in your company already, then Amazon EC2 is also good for hosting websites.
There are many other good web hosting providers such as GoDaddy.com etc. But given our lesser experience working with GoDaddy, we cannot provide more details on it.
If you need help in choosing productivity plugins for your website such as for CRM, marketing, lead generation. form building and payments etc., please post a comment and we be glad to offer our advice.
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