Web Hosting For Small Business

If you’re looking for web hosting for small business, you’ll need to understand the basic types of hosting options that are on the market.  Each level of hosting offers you some different advantages at different pricing levels.  In this article, we will discuss how you can use shared, VPS, or dedicated hosting to further your business online.

The first type of hosting we will discuss is shared hosting.  A shared web host will offer you a nice, low price to host a (typically) unlimited numbers of sites.  You are given a fixed amount of bandwidth and disk space which varies with the price of the package.  The reason this is known as “shared” hosting is because you are actually sharing the same server space with other sites.  This does not mean that other sites will have access to your data, but it does mean that performance is typically slower.  If the server is heavily loaded, the performance of all the sites will suffer.  However, most providers these days do quite a good job with providing solid service, so this is a good option unless your business web site is resource intensive, which is often the case with e-commerce sites, or sites with a web application like a ticket system or a support forum.

For these types of applications, you’ll want to step up to either a VPS or a dedicated host.  A VPS is a Virtual Private Server, which is like having your own server all to yourself, except that the server is actually a simulation of a single server that exists on a computing cluster.  Basically, this means that you will have much more resources available to you when compared to a shared hosting package.  This is great if your sites needs the performance.  You are also protected much more from the influence of other sites on the performance of your site, since your VPS “instance” has resources allocated to it that are generally not violated.

Another great thing about VPS hosting for small business is that it is scalable.  That is, if you outgrow the performance of your current server, you can simply pay more and be instantly upgraded to a higher performance machine.  Since there is no physical server, upgrading happens instantly by allocating your instance more resources.  This is a great way for growing small business to scale up without hassle.

If you’re looking for the ultimate in performance, you’ll want to consider dedicated web hosting for your small business.  In this case, you’re paying for access to an actual physical machine. This means that no matter what happens with other peoples sites, your site is completely independent of it.  You get the best performance possible.  Of course, this does cost more, and scaling up is difficult when compared to VPS hosting, but if you need the performance, dedicated is the way to go.

So, I hope this help give you some idea of how to go about choosing the right web hosting provider for your small business.  There are many other factors to consider, but this should give you a good start in understand what the different options are for getting your small business online.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 8th, 2008 at 9:24 pm and is filed under Hosting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.