Australian Web Hosting

Economic downturn sees increase in eCommerce web hosting

The current economic downturn and rising unemployment figures due to retrenchments has seen a marked increase in web hosting accounts as more and more people are turning to the internet as a source of income.

In particular, an ever increasing number of house-wives are endeavouring to establish small home-based businesses and revenue sources. These Work At Home Mums or WAHMS are driven by a need to supplement the family income, while remaining at home often minding small children. Rising child-care center fees and in some cases the recent closures of child-care centers like ABC Learning Centers has made it either difficult or not economically viable for these mums to fulfil normal employment.

WAHMS are discovering exciting new areas of income production including eCommerce and Affiliate Marketing. We see a marked increase in the number of professional e-store applications, more expenditure on internet advertising programs, and an increase in web hosting accounts with emails, blogs and portals.

Web hosts are needing to redesign what was previously a “computer wizards world” into something much more user friendly and easy to operate. WAHMS are not interested in whether you have IMAP access or 25 FTP accounts, they just want a site that is easy to update with email etc that just works straight out of the box.

auStores Web Hosting and e-Stores is one web host that has always supported the WAHMS, and have designed their hosted e-stores with friendly usability in mind! In addition they have a specially trained support team who know and understand exactly what the customer is trying to achieve. Their support desk is second to none when it comes to either just providing a few tips, or simply fixing the problem.

I was impressed when a visitor to this blog informed me that she had a free e-store with auStores some years ago, and had been having trouble with changing the background color of her page heading. She logged on to her e-store one morning to update some products, and to her delight discovered that not only had some-one fixed the background, but they had nicely re-formatted her header text into table cells for her.

Now that is definitely support service on and above the call of duty. When I spoke to John Kelso at auStores about this, he responded that during “quiet” periods Support Staff were required to browse customers sites and to fix any obvious errors the client may have inadvertently made.

My advice to anyone contemplating trading on the internet, is to thoroughly consider their options, be very wary of the get-rich-quick schemes (If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is) and look for hidden costs and fees that some unscrupulous web hosts seem to forget to mention upfront.