Introduction
With the costs of building a website falling dramatically, this whitepaper from Alibaba Cloud explores the opportunities for businesses, particularly SMEs, in setting up and operating their own websites. It highlights the case of the “micro-national” business, which is an SME that can trade and grow globally facilitated by a web presence and an e-commerce trading platform. It goes on to explore the wider global social and economic imperatives to see more SMEs operating online, helping them reach global markets with their websites quicker and at a lower cost than ever before. A section of the whitepaper explains the technical aspects of setting up a website and benefits of working with a cloud computing service provider with global infrastructure. The rise of the “Primary Provider” is a particularly important phenomenon which has simplified the process for SMEs. A “Primary Provider” brings together the infrastructure, the platform, applications software and domain registration under one roof, improving speed and making billing and control much simpler. By relying on a Primary Provider such as an established cloud service provider for web hosting, it is now possible to launch a website with almost any country domain around the world from the large English-speaking countries to China, the world’s single largest market - for under a dollar.
