**UPDATED: Since this article was originally published, iPage has stepped up with a significant offering for its customers. For the month of August 2012, you can get goMobi for $1.99 mo. See more details here…
When you purchase a web hosting package from any of the top website hosting companies these days, you’ll likely get a lot of extra features besides your basic hosting services. Web hosting companies want to make it as easy as possible for you to build and add features that will promote your site and increase your chances of success. You’ll likely see things like e-commerce software, free advertising credits, SEO tools, and more.
Surprisingly, the one thing you don’t often see is some promotion involving surely one of the largest areas of opportunity on line—mobile computing. Most experts agree that everyone should make their website mobile compatible—making it easier to view and interact with on smart phones. With the continued explosion of smart phone usage, this can be a huge area of profitability for business websites.
While you certainly don’t need your web host to assist you with making your site smart phone friendly, it would seem to make sense if they included some kind of mobile site building support with their hosting plans. Yes, you can go to an outside site (like mobileit.com) to get the job done–the same could be said for a lot of the other features that are currently included in hosting plans. Things like e-commerce software, credit card payment acceptance, SEO software, etc. could also be obtained elsewhere, but the hosting companies are willing to provide it for you–so why not mobile site tools?
Apparently, a lot of the web hosting companies still consider making a web site mobile as a design task—which I agree it is. However, it would seem to make sense given the huge potential growth of mobile computing, they would want to include some tools to simplify the task for novice webmasters—and be able to promote this as a reason to choose their hosting. Sure, you could go to an outside source or search for a CMS template (WordPress, Drupal, etc.), for mobile site support. But for less techie people, this might seem to be a bit too much.
While I expect most hosting companies to offer mobile site promotions in the future, the good news is I did find some hosts that do currently promote or provide website builders that allow for mobile site creation.
At 1&1 Hosting (one of the few that actually promote mobile site creation) you get NetObjects Fusion or Adobe Dreamweaver to help with your mobile site design when you sign up for their Unlimited or Business Hosting plans.
With Hostgator offers a number of site builders that can help build your mobile website.
And with iPage, you can use the Weebly Drag and Drop Site Builder that comes with your hosting plan to create your mobile site.