Affordable Dental Website Hosting
From LoveToKnow Web-Design
Affordable dental website hosting is quickly becoming one of the fastest growing niche industries on the Internet. As the demand for dentistry surpasses the supply of quality, local dentists, people find themselves turning to the Internet to find a dentist, at least within their home state, who serves the community with high-quality dentistry.
The Search for Affordable Dental Website Hosting
For a dentist, finding high-quality and affordable dental website hosting can feel overwhelming. There are multitudes of hosting companies throughout the Internet that offer their services, but it can be very difficult for a dentist who is not knowledgeable about Internet to choose a web host.
Decide What You Really Need
A website for a dental practice is unique in a number of ways. When a dentist decides to put up a web page, that website becomes both the global "front door" to the practice, as well as a large sign that promotes the dental practice to all potential clients. This certainly makes the website a marketing tool to bring in more patients and more revenue for your practice. This means that the website should be search engine optimized (SEO), and the design should be clean and professional.
Additionally, a dental website also provides valuable services to new and existing customers. Dentists like to both keep in touch with their patients, and allow their patients to contact them with any concerns as well. Most dentists also feel very passionate about dentistry and enjoy writing newsletters about it. A website is a perfect way to distribute that writing, not only to your patients, but also to the world. The following are a few features that a dentist should look for when shopping for a company to host the dental website.
- An excellent record of "uptime," or how long the server remains running and operational every day
- Search engine optimization services
- Multiple email accounts for staff
- 24/7 phone or online support for any technical problems
- Secure form processing for patient appointments or requests
- Medical form storage for patients to easily download
- Easy content editing so that you can update the page without knowing HTML
- The ability to host a store with dental products
- Newsletter, or blog support
- Forum support for staff, patients, or both
- Support for online appointment scheduling
- Copywriting services for Dental topics (if you aren't a writer yourself)
Compare Dental Website Hosting Companies
There are a surprising number of web hosts who have noticed the high demand for this particular web hosting niche and they've created tailored hosting programs specifically for dentists. The following list provides examples of a few. You could also perform a search for hosts in your local area by using the search term "web hosting" followed by your city or state.
- Dental Matrix is easily one of the best dental hosts available. They offer an impressive list of tools called iEdit, iCard, iCalendar, and others. These tools offer most of the critical services that dentists need to run a website and stay in touch with patients.
- Proceptive Dental offers excellent web server uptime, up to 10 unique email accounts for staff, website marketing, and even a free "47 point" analysis of your existing website (SEO Optimization).
- Dental Websites is a small-scale hosting company, but it offers important services like anti-spam email, reliable servers, online patient forms, and even multi-media support.
- TNT Dental is a more professional hosting company that offers both high-quality dental hosting as well as "platform support packages" that includes support with updating your website and a support package that includes SEO optimization.
- Officite provides more on the side of website marketing than hosting features, but the websites offered are still high quality. If your focus is mostly marketing, this is a good place to start, but expect to pay close to $1000 or more for the site with marketing included.
- Arexa Dental is a another high quality dental hosting company that offers fantastic tools for dentists such as custom design, contact forms, medical forms, and even office photo hosting.
- My Practice Online offers template "starter" websites for $199 along with their standard web hosting packages (not particularly tailored toward dentists.)
- Dental Web Services is a very high quality service with dental websites that even include interactive driving maps, and weekly website statistics updates.
Hire a Non-Dental Host and Save a Fortune
While hiring a hosting service that markets specifically to dentists might feel reassuring, the truth is that most of these services are run by standard web hosting companies. These companies have simply put together the Internet tools and services that they know dentists will need. Hiring these hosts will typically cost you at least twice as much as a standard web designer and web host.
Another option that's far less expensive is to find a regular web host that you trust, and ask them about the particular services that you need as a dental provider. Most professional web designers can offer you the same services. And, since the services aren't packaged and promoted to the dental niche specifically, you stand to save significantly on your web hosting costs.
Learn More
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