Labs

Business Pack is BT's cheapest substantial web-hosting package. It provides adequate web space at 500MB and a very generous monthly bandwidth limit of 48GB, which is a lot more than you're likely to need. However, you can't create any subdomains.

The Business Pack comes with BT's Business Email Lite package. This gives you 20 POP3 email accounts, which you must configure as an alias of an associated @btconnect.co.uk address. We expect a more professional email implementation at this level. What's more, IMAP support is limited to the more expensive Business Email Plus package, but you

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can still use Outlook through POP3 needs be. A shared SSL facility is included for those who have to collect sensitive data, but sadly there is no form of database support.

As with all the other packages on test this month, registering and connecting your domain to the hosting account is a breeze: simply follow the onscreen instructions. You can upload your website through FTP, FrontPage or the online file manager, although the latter option is clumsy and confusing. Account and email management takes place within a tidy control panel that's easy to navigate, but the Website Centre launches with a completely different interface in another window.

The Website Centre is basic but functional and provides a selection of useful tools, including some basic CGI scripts. You can use the EasySiteWizard to create and publish a basic website, and there are also photo album, chat and blog tools. These are all useful for novice webmasters but, as with all similar tools, they won't create a particularly original site.

BT's Business Pack isn't a bad deal, but compared with its similarly priced competitors, it isn't a really well-rounded or flexible hosting package.