Choosing the Best Host for Your Small Business Website

If you plan to start a business in Nigeria, you definitely need a website.

In recent years, Internet penetration in Nigeria has increased to 53 per cent, which is the highest in Africa. In a country of over 192 million people, consisting of 61 million active bank customers with e-payment transactions worth N56 trillion in a year, the potential for online payments in Nigeria is enormous, yet it hasn’t been fully utilized.

Now that you know the importance of a website for your business, the problem now is how to build one and at what cost. You may be undecided whether to give a professional web designer who charges a fortune or you could build one yourself, this might seem like a herculean task due to the programming skills required. Building a website isn’t rocket science anymore, anyone with basic computer skills can build one.

Building Your Website

First, you need a web hosting service to provide a solid foundation for your website. I want to share with you a new web hosting company and domain registrar that is new to the Nigerian market, they’re called HUB8. They are good for personal and commercial hosting purposes, they have a reliable uptime and a variety of products to choose from. HUB8 is new to Nigeria, but they have a strong background in other countries.

Tools To Build Your Website

HUB8 has you covered, whatever tool you choose, be it the visual website builder, wordpress with premium themes or any CMS you’re familiar with, or cPanel web hosting, there’s always a FREE plan for an easy start.

These are the 4 products HUB8 offers:

1. Domain names:

They are domain registrar, they manage the registration of internet domain names. Simply put, a domain name registrar allows you to officially register your desired website name so that it is unique to you and no one else can lay claim to it, eg. mysmallbusinesswebsite.com or whatever name you choose. HUB8 has got one of the easiest domain setups you can find out there, literarily no technical skills are needed. You can also hide your identity from prying eyes with their free privacy protection. They are presently working to add .com.ng and .ng domains to their domain portfolio.

The domain prices are also very affordable, a .com domain sells for as low as N2,886, .org N3,632 and .net N3,650. Click here to get full prices and to check for available domains.

2. Website builder:

After buying a domain, the next step is to build the website. You can build a website in 5 minutes with the website builder. A website builder is a program that allows you to design and develop your own website through an easy interface that takes all the hard work out. You can produce a beautiful and functional website without having to understand technicalities like code, even for your online shop. These come with 190 website templates to ease design, they’re mobile friendly and the most amazing part they’re for free. If you wish to have unlimited bandwidth, backup management and other premium features, you can upgrade to any plan that suits your business needs. Click here to view the prices and plan for the website builder.

3. Content Management Sites

HUB8 also covers those who know the technicalities of using a content management site (CMS) like Wordpress. Their managed wordpress hosting is easy to start, has premium themes and they give you automatic updates. As usual, HUB8 offers free plans, which gives you 500 mb of space, for 1 website, has 16 premium templates and 100gb bandwidth. They have the paid basic plan for new businesses and pro plan for advanced websites with massive traffic. Click here to check out the wordpress plans.

You may wonder, if their web host is compatible with other CMS? Their web host is fully compatible with Joomla, Drupal, Magento and many others – just check the following product.

4. cPanel Web Hosting:

For the techies who have built their website from the scratch. There’s the free cPanel hosting for a single website, 500 mb free space and 100 gb bandwidth. Their performance is excellent with Ultra-fast SSD disk with hardware RAID, optimized versions of Nginx, MySQL & PHP to speed up your website loading time. Daily back up, DDoS protection, dual antivirus to regularly check the program code of your website, 99.9% uptime and 24/7 support.

All these may look to good to be true, yes there good and they are true, but not too good to be true. Then why are they giving these paid products for free you may ask? Hub8’s philosophy is to provide a website at the minimum cost for business owners, all these are subject to change for new users, so why not get these freebies as soon as possible?

With all these freebies, amazing and easy to use services, getting online shouldn’t be an issue anymore. This offer may not last long, so build your website now and see what you think of Hub8. After all, with so much to gain and with absolutely nothing to lose shouldn’t you at least give it a try?