It can't be said too often: on the World Wide Web, content is king. Instead of concentrating their efforts on creating compelling content, however, businesses can easily get bogged down in the details of budgeting hardware and software for (and full time employees to care for and feed) a Web server that, based on real-world demand, the company will never actually need and which, given the rapid evolution of HTML and of HTTP, will be obsolete within a couple of years. Too often, this misdirection of effort results in excessive, unnecessary expenditures for an unsatisfactory result.

This is not to say that a company should never host a Web server internally. If you're looking to exploit Intranet technology by running a Web server for employees inside the corporate firewall, your only choice is to use an internal hosting model. If yours is an Internet-based business which provides a search service or other widely-popular, million-"hits"-per-month URI or if you want to do secure retail commerce, it makes perfect sense to host your own hardware, administer your own servers and buy your own bandwidth.

The facts are that corporate Intranets are still the exception, not the rule, and that most companies are not going to provide content which will be as attractive to the average Internet Websurfer as is that of Yahoo! or HotWired or the Internet Underground Music Archives. Sorry, but it's true. In fact, most business sites on the Web are dismally uninteresting to the majority of the users on the Web. And, while a little creativity and effort can go a long way toward making any site more attractive, the unvarnished truth is that most Web sites don't generate a million "hits" a month, and that's unlikely to change.

So, if you're not yet ready to build a corporate Intranet and you want to offer something short of a full-service retail corporate presence on the Web, why would you want to build, maintain, administer and secure your own Web server and buy your own telecom services to hook it to the Internet? For your company, it may make better sense to pay a third-party provider to host an iteration of its own T1-or-better-connected Web server aliased to your company's domain name, (a so-called "virtual server"), so that your internal effort can concentrate on maximizing the content of your company's Web pages. You may even be able to use S-HTTP or SSL to do secure retail transactions, (although, if you're going to do commercial transactions on other than an experimental basis, you're more likely to want to host your Web site internally).

For less than $100 per month, you should be able to find a provider who will allocate you forty megabytes or so of disk space on a virtual server, with a private CGI script directory, a Unix shell account for administration and ongoing registration of your domain name with the required minimum of two pingable nameservers and a detailed weekly activity summary drawn from the Web server's logs. The provider will take care of server administration and maintenance, software upgrades and providing a high-speed link between your virtual server and the Internet, while you will be responsible for establishing and maintaining the content of your pages. Many Web hosting providers also offer content authoring assistance. Rates for this service vary considerably. So does the level of quality and the two don't necessarily have anything to do with each other.

If you choose this strategy and you don't already have a domain name, you can expect to be charged an initial setup fee over and above the $50 that the InterNIC charges to register your domain name. Don't pay more than an additional $100 for this service and be certain you get a fully-portable CIDR IP address block assignment that goes with the domain name (get it in writing). This will let you transfer your Web server in-house in the event that your company's hosting strategy changes and/or let you switch service providers without sacrificing your registered domain name. (Should it be required, the switch-over from external to internal hosting can happen in as little as five minutes, and without requiring any user to update his or her URI hotlist--the nameservers which support the existing virtual server are updated to point to a new IP address for your company's www servername, the virtual server is killed, your company's internal host is started and the changeover is made with no one the wiser.)

You will want to spend some time doing due diligence research before choosing a third-party provider for your company. Visit the home pages of every provider you consider. Visit the sites of several of the companies to which they play host and note how quickly these sites respond (a rough measure of the kind of performance your own site would display if hosted by the same provider). Check to see whether the client companies' Web pages use tricks like counters, guestbooks and so on (indications that the provider's clients have access to CGI or SSI). Look for telephone numbers of the providers' client companies, call them and ask about their level of satisfaction with the provider. You might also look for users' comments about service providers on The List, (http://www.thelist.com), but remember that opinions are like IP addresses--everybody has one and no two are the same.