Johannesburg, 26 Apr 2022
If not now, then when?
That’s been the consensus taken by millennials and Generation Z during the COVID lockdown periods experienced in South Africa and around the world.
A generation of young (and not-so-young) adults opting to take the future into their own hands and carve a path for themselves. Choosing to break away from the standard nine-to-five that left many of them disenfranchised.
The culmination of the standard job showing massive uncertainty along with COVID restrictions birthed a series of actions now known as the Great Resignation, which is exactly what it sounds like: generations of people quitting their jobs to start their own thing.
A huge number of small businesses were started in 2021, many of them being digital in nature. Research undertaken by SCORE showed that 88% of entrepreneurs believe online sales are an important source of revenue. We’d tend to agree, even without the data.
This data correlates with The ZA Central Registry findings showing 73 000 new .co.za domains registered and renewed from March 2020 to February 2021. The new generation of adults aren’t playing around when it comes to e-commerce solutions for the growing employment problem they’re facing.
So, what does this all mean, you ask? It means transitioning into the digital realm for a viable living solution is more relevant than ever. In the age of the internet, kilobytes is king.
Realise the importance of an online presence for any company trying to exist in the modern age. Whether it’s a social media account, website or a landing page with an introductory video, if it’s not online, how seriously do you really take it?
Think about it: when was the last time you made a major purchase from or used a service that didn’t have an online presence?
That’s the power of digital. You’d do well to venture into it before it’s too late, but are you equipped to make the leap while avoiding the pitfalls?
Tricks of the trade for online businesses
If you’ve been pondering taking your business online for a while now but didn’t know how to go about doing it, we’ll walk you through the process.
First off, you’ll need to figure out what your business needs from being online. Is it a simple website, a remote work environment for your employees, for your business to be in the cloud, or an entire physical server of your own?
To give you a rough sketch, you’ll more than likely need a website regardless of the type of operation you’re running. If your business is focused on retail goods, an e-commerce website would be better suited for you.
If you need to get your business online quickly, a VPS is a good option. If scalability is your concern, then cloud hosting is likely to be a better choice. Cloud servers accommodate your growing company in the most seamless way possible, offering a bigger chunk of resources as you scale.
Assuming you need a server but don’t have the manpower to run it yourself, managed servers serve as a nifty solution. You get all the performance and resource output without having to worry about upkeep.
A dedicated server is likely out of the cards for a budding business, but makes an excellent solution to large amounts of processes, data storage and workload required for massive operations to run smoothly.
Since most businesses tend to need a website first, we’ve created a brief checklist of what you’ll need to get your business website online. If a website isn’t in the cards for you right now, a professional e-mail address can do wonders for your brand. Take a look at the checklist:
- Buy a domain name and hosting
- Get a professional e-mail address
- Install an SSL certificate
- Install a CMS
- Build your website
- Create and publish content
We’ve written extensively on each of these steps, so you’ll be able to educate yourself wherever you are in the process. Again, if a website is not part of your current plan, a professional e-mail address at the least is imperative.
Besides a fancy website or professional e-mail address, bringing your business online offers advantages that simply can’t be matched when operating strictly offline.
Having that custom e-mail domain makes a world of difference as a start-up. It shows clients and correspondents that you mean business.
We’ve got a manager mail network that ensures your mail delivery is protected. This way you and your contacts can rest easy knowing the mail you sent is the mail they’ll receive.
Most web hosting companies (us included) offer a custom e-mail address as part of a web hosting package.
Besides the host of major top-level domains (TLD) we offer, we also throw in a free .co.za domain to help you get started locally.
Loads of tools with Softaculous
One of the primary perks of taking your business online is having it automated. We all know how time-consuming (and draining) admin tasks can be, but someone has to do them.
In steps Softaculous, which you get free with all of our cPanel web hosting packages. Softaculous is a script library that automatically installs scripts and software that you need – with just one click.
The many offerings can accommodate any business type. Whether you’re looking to download CMSes like WordPress, forums like myBB, project management tools, customer support systems or file management scripts, Softaculous has got you covered.
Here are some of the many free scripts you’d likely use as a start-up:
- Blogs
- WordPress, HTMLy
- Real estate website templates
- Forums
- phpBB, myBB
- Wikis
- Project management
- E-commerce
- OpenCart, WHMCS, PrestaShop
- Invoicing tools
- Enterprise resource planning (ERP)
- SugarCRM
- Customer support
- osTicket, OpenSupports
- Web frameworks
- Bootstrap, Laravel, Smarty
- Educational tools
- Moodle
- File management
-ownCloud, Nextcloud
Those are just some of the categories with a few of the more popular scripts and plugins. Having these at your fingertips will give you the option of hashing out certain tasks yourself over a couple of hours. This means you save valuable resources and time on important tasks.
Recording all your data may have worked out when you had single-digit clients, but you’d have noticed the more your business grew the harder maintaining records and backups of everything became.
Hard copy backups can be useful, but online backups provide a secure place for all your data and records to be kept without it occupying precious office space.
The benefit of online backups is that it can be automated, and retrieved with a couple of clicks. Our Acronis backups of cloud servers and personal devices provide a blanket of protection for all the data you want to secure.
Online side hustles – affiliate programme and resellers
If things are going a bit slower than you’d have wanted on the business growth end, you can also explore a viable online side hustle.
If you’re a trusted vendor within your community you can help people bring their start-ups online by reselling different kinds of hosting through a trusted hosting company. Our own reseller packages offer VPS, Hosting, LiteSpeed, Acronis Online Backup and Domain resellers.
You’ll essentially act as a hosting company of your own, taking care of your clients’ online server needs as they arise. This doesn’t necessarily mean you make their website pretty. You simply give them the boost they need to get their business online and help them keep it online.
This is an excellent side hustle option if you’re looking to branch into the tech field. Plus, if you run into any technical issue you can’t fix, get in touch with our support team and they’ll help you out.
If your word is your bond, you may look into an affiliate programme that matches a stellar product you believe in.
Our own affiliate programme offers 5% commissions for each referral's service, for the life of that service – in short, residual income. You’ll also receive payouts from R1 000 for successful sales.
Naturally, our products and services sell themselves, but we’ve taken the liberty of opening an avenue for aspiring kickstarters to, well, kickstart their own ventures with some cashflow on the side.
These options are especially useful as you try to navigate your business hours to fit an entire working day. Time is money, and if your business is to bloom, you’d do well to spend your extra time making some.
Now’s the time for your start-up to grow up
Times have been tough for small to medium businesses over the last couple of years. About 43% of respondents to a National Bureau of Economic Research study mentioned temporary closes for small to medium businesses in America. In the same vein, 74% of start-ups were affected negatively in India.
Although, the global web hosting services market size was over one trillion rand in 2020. That’s expected to rise to just under four trillion rand by 2028. If this is not indicative of an online revolution, nothing is.
If there was ever a time to venture into online business, it would be now. It works out especially well since all our products and services have a money-back guarantee should you be unhappy.
Besides the money-back guarantee, our excellent service and swift support response times mean that you’ll never be out in the cold while waiting for an issue to be resolved. Don’t take our word for it, head over to TrustPilot and HelloPeter to check for yourself.
Yes, times have been tough, we know. From our vantage point, however, a feasible solution to the ever-growing employment struggle is a digital remedy – and our antidote is ready.
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