Smaller web hosting firms will cause you problems if you receive lots of visitors each month.

Now admittedly these traffic numbers are likely to take some time to grow - unless you’ve got a powerful backer who gets you all over the media as soon as you launch - but if you genuinely expect 50,000+ page views each month sooner or later you’d better start planning for it now.

You see, as mentioned in our Jargon Buster section your small business web hosting account will likely have a bandwidth limit. Go over this and your website will stop being shown.

I’ve had it happen to me when a new website suddenly started to do rather better than expected and traffic exploded one month when Google started to include it in their index.

My host stopped showing my website without warning.

Well, I say without warning.

To be fair, with most small business web hosting accounts you can check your bandwidth use in comparison to your limit quite easily using your web hosting control panel but as the site was so new I hadn’t bothered checking it until Google suddenly threw 500 surprise visitors at my site every single day for a month!

Infact, the first thing I knew was that I started to get emails saying “Why can’t I access your site?”. That’s right. Like this site it was a free content site yet people were taking the time to badger and poke me about not being able to gain access!

Indeed, if you had visited this site when all this happened you’d only have seen one thing…

So if you’re expecting a lot of visitors you better be certain your small business web hosting account can take it or you’ll be wasting your traffic generation efforts.

There are a number of ways to do this:

The first is to play close attention to your bandwidth use (ahem!) and if you’re getting close to your monthly quota then if your host will let you “add on” some extra bandwidth for that period then go for it. It’s generally not expensive, just inconvenient.

Unfortunately this is really only a short-term solution however because it means constantly tracking your bandwidth use and making extra upgrade payments for more.

A better option if you keep on going over your small business web host’s limit is to see if your host will let you upgrade your whole account. For a small increase in your monthly fees you may be able to move up to the next “level” of account providing you with far higher bandwidth availability on your small business web hosting account.

This is really only feasible however if you are paying for your hosting monthly.

Because if you paid for a years-worth of fees in advance and are only 3 months into your contract  you’d have to wait another 9 months for the changes to take effect. And that’s just not acceptable.

Then there’s the last - and arguably the best - option of all for high traffic websites looking for a suitable small business web hosting solution.

And that is to find a web hosting firm that offers *unlimited bandwidth*.

Unlimited bandwidth means just that - it doesn’t matter how many visitors you get, how many pages they look at and how many files they download your website will stay live and active and ready to receive plenty more.

And these web hosts offering unlimited bandwidth are now quite competetively priced due to increased competition in the market so are well worth a look these days.

One great example is…