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Web
Hosting
Once your law firm has registered a domain name, found
a web designer, and the site is being constructed, your firm should
consider web hosting.
Your law firm's web site can be hosted either by a
third party company (out-sourced) or hosted on your own law firm's
servers.
If your law firm is large enough and has a dedicated
IT department, hosting the web site on your own servers may be a
viable option. However, since web hosting costs have dropped rapidly
in the past few years, we recommend outsourcing your hosting needs
to a third party web host.
Since many web hosts provide free technical support,
the hassle of keeping your web site online is diminished. Further,
many web hosts have unique features that would be costly to install
on an individual basis, such as web traffic statistics, firewalls,
security, encryption, email, etc.
Depending upon your firm's technology needs, web hosting
usually comes in two basic flavors: UNIX and MICROSOFT.
Unix/Linux web hosts are usually cheaper because they
use shareware or freeware products, such as Apache web server software,
mySQL databases, php middleware software, free email programs, and
other such unlicensed products. While cheap normally equates with
poor quality, in this case, many UNIX hosts are more reliable than
Microsoft based hosts and cost 50% less.
However, the host you choose will depend upon the
technology that your web site needs. If your web site is database
driven and your web designer uses .asp, .cfm, .jsp, .php, or .cfm
your web site will need a special type of web host. However, if
your web site is based strictly on static .html or .htm web pages,
your site can be hosted with any web host provider.
When comparing web hosts your law firm should look
at the following information:
How long have they been in business?
How much are their hosting plans?
Can you upgrade your plan seamlessly?
How much storage do you get?
What type of web traffic analysis programs?
Support for streaming media?
Database support? What type?
Email accounts?
Bandwidth?
Do they host warez, crackz, adult content?
Dedicated IP address?
Shared Hosting?
Now that you have selected a web host, we can discuss
added features of law firm web sites, such as Flash.
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