15 Jan

When Is The Best Time To Start Your Online Business?

Last Updated on July 8, 2021 by Joanna Isac

They say “There’s a perfect timing for everything”, but is there the best time to start an online business?

Is there such a thing as the best time of a year to start new business? According to the US Small Business Administration (SBA), there are more than 30.2 million small businesses in the United States alone. While these businesses certainly didn’t start up at the exact same time, you’d wonder if there is a certain time where it’s more ideal to launch an online business.

Some would say, January sounds good, since it’s the beginning of the new year. Some say, start as young as you can because entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg did tremendously well in their young days. Perhaps you should wait until you’ve secured financing, or the kids are in school, or you’re vested in your pension at work. Or maybe, in fact, there’s no time like the present?

Successful entrepreneurs describe having an instinctive sense that it’s time to move from thinking about a business to actually launching one. Here are five signs you’re ready to open your online business.

Your Readiness To Become An Entrepreneur

As an entrepreneur, you can expect to put in long hours at all sorts of tasks, and it may be a while before you get rewarded. You’ll need to convince people to become your customers or invest in your idea. You’ll have doubters, naysayers, setbacks, and rejections.

You’ll overcome all of this far better if you are truly passionate about your business idea. Being unemployed isn’t a good enough reason to start a business, but feeling driven to provide a solution to a problem is.

Financial Stability

Your financial situation is a key consideration when determining whether to start a business. How much risk can you tolerate? If you are currently in a stable employment situation and have a family do you really want to strike out on your own? Starting a new online business can also take significant amounts of startup capital if you have to purchase equipment, rent/lease business space, and hire employees.

Your financial starting point is a business plan that shows—among other things—how much money you’ll need to start your business, where it will come from, and how long you expect it to take for your business to become profitable. And there are other financial issues to sort out before you take the leap. Ensure how you’ll keep your personal life afloat, whether that means accumulating a year’s worth of savings or relying on income from a job.

Do you have savings or access to funding from family, or the ability to secure debt financing from a lending institution or equity financing from angel investors?

Prepare Yourself

Not everyone has the required personality traits to thrive as a business owner. Aside from extensive knowledge of the particular industry, to be successful as a business owner requires self-motivation and a variety of organizational, management, and marketing skills, as well as the ability to deal with customers and vendors.

Business Plan

Think if you’re ready for starting a business, but are concerned about whether or not you have the “right” traits and attitudes to become an entrepreneur.

Time & Energy To Establish New Business

The best time to start a new online venture is when your life is otherwise relatively calm. If your current situation includes a new baby, a wedding, a divorce, caregiving for a sick family member, a big move, or any other major life stressors, it may be best to wait until things settle down a bit and you can devote your full attention to launching your new enterprise.

Effect On Family

If you are married, be aware that running a business is a family affair. Aside from the family financial considerations stated above, starting a business generally requires much more of your time than regular employment and will likely continue to do so for many years to come. The time commitment and the associated stresses and uncertainties of running a business can place an undue strain on family relationships. Note, however, that involving family members in your business can also be very beneficial. Aside from providing trusted help, employing your spouse and/or children has great tax advantages.

Your family may have to take financial or personal sacrifices to help your business succeed. Start your business after you’ve talked things through with them and resolved any major concerns.

Trust Your Inner Wisdom

Plenty of would-be entrepreneurs hesitate for months or years, waiting for all the stars to align. There’s a fine line between jumping in without adequate thought and overthinking everything to the point where your business never gets off the ground. Listen to your instincts. If you’ve thought through the practicalities and you feel you’re ready, it’s probably time to go for it.

Starting a business of your own – whether full-time or on the side – can be a great move, provided you do so when the timing is right.

Setting The Right Expectations

The key to running any successful business is to set the right expectations and the right level of commitment. Most people quit their businesses within their first year. If you aren’t willing to devote at least 3-5 years to your business, don’t even bother. Why? Because most of the wealth and the profits are to be had well after your first year. Expecting your business to be vastly profitable within a short time frame is a half assed way to think about your business.

Let’s be realistic as we at Softsys Hosting. During the first year of any online business, your website is probably not going to have superior search engine placement. Your business probably won’t have a large customer base. Your business probably won’t have much name recognition. It takes time for word of mouth to spread. It takes time for things to snowball. Be patient and results will come.

12 Jan

Major Web Hosting Trends Of 2020

Last Updated on January 12, 2020 by Ruchir Shastri

There are lot of obstacles that a web hosting company has to overcome to become a reputable and reliable business. Most important among them is security as around 30,000 websites got hacked every single day. Offering 99% uptime level is good, but not enough in today’s world, especially with the big and leading players who are always ahead of competitors.

The ease of doing a business online, especially e-commerce one, is among important factors driving the growth of web hosting industry. E-commerce market needs reliable and always live website operations, maintenance of data on a regular basis, ultimate security, and these are some aspects where web hosting providers focus their product developments.

The growth of web hosting industry is not without issues.  The biggest threat today in web hosting is the changing user attitudes toward hosting. According to the Google Trends, the search term “web hosting” dropped by 60%. Apart from that, the gap between DIY and professional website creation continues to widen as many small business owners look for the ways to start a website without any decent IT skills. With so many advanced DIY applications covering a wide range of operations, it has become easy for small business owners to design and manage their own websites.

That being said, let’s take a closer look on the major web hosting trends of 2020.

Green Web Hosting

The Internet’s annual CO2 output is equal to 31 million cars driving around the world all at once.

How does it generate so much CO2?

Websites are stored on servers that are kept in facilities called data centers. Servers are expected to work 24/7 and like our daily gadgets such as phones and laptops, they get hot. Therefore, the hardware in data centers are stored in a cool and controlled environment. This, however, requires an incredibly energy-intensive cooling systems. End result is a significant increase of CO2 output.

Fortunately, as the concern for Global Warming are increasing every year, web hosting companies are now investing in carbon offsetting schemes. In green web hosting, web hosts actively participate in eco-friendly initiatives to reduce negative impacts on the environment. They do this by gaining renewable energy certificates (REC) or carbon offset certificates (VER).

RECs certify that a hosting company helped in generating renewable energy. Companies which specialize in creating renewable energy generate these RECs and sell them to a hosting provider. The money from this purchase then finances the operational costs for green energy initiatives. VERs, however, certify that a hosting company helped in reducing the amount of greenhouse gases that the certificate states.

Cloud Hosting

Ultimate cloud hosting is the future of web hosting. It has gained immense popularity in recent years with the range of services offered by companies like AWS, Google Cloud, Azure and many smaller companies like Jelastic which are ever evolving with lots of new services added every year.  Cloud hosting is a concept utilized in many areas of technology, and it has now entered the arena of web hosting. The cloud has no physical equivalent, and it doesn’t have a physical server. Instead, it stores data across multiple computers, which then provide access via network connection like the Internet. Unlike a single physical computer, it has endless processing power and storage space.

Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting is a game-changer for many online businesses. Unlike the typical dedicated server configurations, cloud hosting is more affordable as it eliminates the constraints of physical servers. Much like cloud management software solutions, cloud hosting provides a more efficient platform for your data. In cloud hosting, your site’s resources can be pulled from multiple different virtual servers. It provides a hosting solution that is both scalable and reliable and has multiple payment options such as pay as you go, etc.

HTTPs As The Standard

Since July 2018, Google Chrome started to mark non-HTTPs websites as “not secure.” To understand this better, Chrome which is a cross platform browser from Google, has a 71% worldwide market share. To encourage sites to shift into HTTPs, Google Search even promised a fair rankings boost. This started offering of free HTTPs the norm in the web hosting arena with all major control panels having built in options to install free SSL certificates on the website.

There are many benefits of using HTTPs. It helps a website rank higher on search engines and protects sensitive data at the same time. This ensures that all information gathered on a website is secured and safe from most Internet thieves. For web hosting providers, offering customers HTTPs is not just something that’s nice to have but also a must-have these days. Not doing so can make you lag in the race, especially now that there are many web hosting companies offering free HTTPs.

Fewer Data Centers

A study by Gartner reports that worldwide spending on data centers will see a decline of 2.8 percent in the year 2019. This is the largest spending decline that data centers will experience, according to the Gartner research.

Cloud offering is also eliminating some of the data center roles. It is one of the main factors behind the declining number of data centers. With the number of enterprises now opting for cloud does not need infrastructures set up, which in turn affects the number of people needed to manage servers, storage, and networks.

Managed Web Hosting Services 

Managed web hosting has gained immense popularity in the hosting arena. It is also the main reason why customers stick with a hosting company for a long time. For growing websites or online businesses, managed hosting trends have become a great solution, especially if you don’t have much technical know-how in the aspects of performance optimization and security. With the increased complexities and regulatory requirements, it has become a norm even with companies that use cloud platforms to outsource their web hosting management needs.

Managed Hosting

Targeting Markets

Web hosting companies, like other businesses, run on continuous hard work and efforts of retaining old clients and attracting new ones. Nonetheless, not all market segments can be covered by a single web hosting provider. While large hosting companies rely on numbers through their marketing, smaller one’s may focus on a specific niche and offer a more personal service level.