Lecture 20: Lesson 8: Hosting Options

IBM Unveils New Express Software for Smaller Firms

U.S. computer company International Business Machines Corp on Wednesday launched software and financing facilities aimed to win over medium-sized businesses, as it competes with U.S. rival Microsoft. Click here to read the rest of this news story.

Notes from The Lesson Plan

The learning objectives of lesson 8 include:

• Describe the various types of traditional and electronic store models
• Define e-commerce software for small, medium, and large business models.

In this lecture, I want to direct your attention to the last link of the lesson plan. This is a pretty typical company who offers web hosting services.

The popquiz will largely be based on this website. In fact, you can prepare the questions in advance:

You are a small business owner who sells specialty golf clubs in a small shop in Augusta Georgia. You have approximately 35 individual items that you sell. You want to give your customers real time credit card processing, but you do not have a merchant account. You are not sure if this will take off and thus do not want to invest a tremendous amount of money into this venture. You have some basic knowledge of webpages and thus you will be preparing and maintaning your own website.

The popquiz will consist of the following questions:

How much will a month of webhosting service cost?

What is the uptime guarantee?

What is the connection?

What will you pay for the merchant account?

Will you get a public or private key encryption?

Have fun with this tool. For extra credit, anyone who wants to write a white paper on the overall costs and benefits of a small business owner hosting with this company, I will replace a quiz grade.

See you tommorrow!