Business Web Hosting - How is it Different?

When you first started your small web site, you just wanted to use it as a way of telling the world about your company. Or maybe you wanted to share some of your passions with visitors and customers. At that time, your low cost hosting package provided a reasonable price. However, you may have noticed for some time now that traffic to your web site has increased. People not only want to come and buy your products but also want to hang around, giving their opinions and comments. You are certainly happy, no doubt, but your web site performance has started getting sluggish. You realize that you probably need a different kind of web hosting for your business.

Let’s take a quick look at some of the more popular kinds of business web hosting on the market today and what the benefits and drawbacks of each one are:

Shared Hosting:

As the name suggests, shared hosting involves you having to share the space on the server with other web sites, which can run into hundreds. This setup immediately reflects in lower costs as all the web sites share the total cost. However, this is also its biggest drawback since the performance of your web site can many times be at the mercy of the other web sites with which you are sharing space. A web site with very heavy traffic can slow down your web site considerably. In addition, most shared hosting packages will restrict the kind of traffic you can have and also the kind of applications supported.

Dedicated Servers:

As the term ‘dedicated’ implies, you will have the luxury of renting one entire physical server for yourself from the hosting company. You have access to all the space on it and complete control over the applications you run. However, the cost of renting a dedicated server can be fairly steep. Plus you may need a technical person to help you set it up and maintain it.

Virtual Private Servers:

A virtual private server is a good compromise between shared hosting and a dedicated server. Though virtual private servers are essentially part of the same physical server, specialized software can divide them into many individual servers, essentially separate from one another. Thus, you have full access to and control over the space in your server while not being affected by resource demands of other web sites sharing the server.

Collocated Hosting:

Collocated hosting solutions allow you to locate your web server on the physical premises of a hosting service provider. Most service providers are fully equipped to maintain servers, with regular backup facilities, network backbones, security against theft and fire and so on. On the other hand, you will have to take care of setting up your server, maintaining it, and fixing it if it breaks down. Though this option does give you a greater degree of control over your web server, it brings in additional complications as well, as you now need highly qualified staff that can take care of running the web server.

Any decision regarding a choice of business web hosting will require you to weigh the benefits of control and flexibility versus the cost, both in terms of money and time. The best balance of cost and time is in contracting for a virtual private server.

Kurt R. Hansen
Find out more at: TheWebHostReport