Business hosting

Overview
Choosing a good business web hosting vendor is essential for any small to midsize business owner (most the larger corporate giants have their own web servers and take care of their hosting needs). Mostly, things don’t vary to a great extent whether you consider small business website hosting, or hosting needs of any growing business, online store or even a blog. But, when it comes to ecommerce hosting, things tend to vary a bit. Ecommerce business website hosting requires very high security levels, and extremely high uptime guarantee to ensure that there are no losses suffered in the revenues of the website.

Ecommerce Business Website Hosting Considerations
When looking for ecommerce business web hosting provider, you should consider many things. Shared website hosting may be suitable for personal blogs, hosting static HTML pages, or small websites, but when it comes to hosting a large online store, you may want to consider VPS and Dedicated Web Servers.

Downsides of Shared Web Hosting
In shared web hosting, the resources are shared by multiple websites, and hence the maintenance cost too. But, in turn the security level is comparatively lower, as a malware affecting a particular site may propagate to others too! It is not just about finding the ideal Web hosting provider, but also how to get the most value from your provider, and even identifying all your primary requirements. With just a bit of research and understanding of business website hosting, you can maximize the uptime and speed of your website with the right host.

VPS – A Decent Option
VPS basically stands for Virtual Private Server, and the customers get a dedicated slice of system resources, which ensures that you never run out of resources until you exceed your allocated quota. However, the physical hardware is shared by a number of hosting clients.

Dedicated Web Servers: The Best Bet for Ecommerce Businesses
Unlike VPS, you can rent an entire web server physically, which is categorised under dedicated server web hosting. Dedicated servers are highly reliable and there’s no interference from outside, which means that your website/online store/ecommerce project remains safe from any kind of intrusion. But, generally the dedicated servers are quite costly, and you’ll need to shell out minimum $200 or so.

Why Should You Opt for Dedicated Web Servers Rather than Purchasing One
This is quite an obvious question that runs through the mind of someone who’s new to the world of dedicated servers, VPS and web hosting. Well, it surely does cost a whole lot of money to rent a dedicated web server, and if you consider the hosting costs for couple of years, you end of spending enough money in which, you can buy a web server of your own. However, buying a web server is not the end of the story as it won’t run on its own. You’ll need a skilled web server monitoring team, and professionals to handle the issues occurring on the server side. Moreover, you’ll have to ensure data protection, data regular back-up and perform a number of tedious tasks. On the other hand, when you rent a server, you’re not responsible for handling any of these problems. Hence, you’re saved from bearing the costs of hiring such professionals, and you dedicated hosting service provider will also provide you with 24/7 customer support to ensure that all your problems get resolved within 24-48 hours.

Types of Online Business Hosting
There are various types of business hosting categories ranging from business blogs, ecommerce stores, down to Large Photos and Video sites as well as massive online encyclopaedias such as WikiPedia.

• Large Photo and Video Sites: There are many massive photo and video sites like YouTube, netcarshows and the likes of them, which consume a whole lot of bandwidth. If you’re planning to host such a site, you must ensure that when your host says “unlimited bandwidth and disk space” in the hosting plan, it really means unlimited! On most occasions unlimited refers to 500 GB of disk space and 5 TB of bandwidth.
• Online Encyclopaedias: Even with just plain text and images, you may end up requiring tremendous disk space and bandwidth. So, if you’re planning to build a mammoth online database or encyclopaedia like Wiki, you should ensure that you’re picking a reliable host who doesn’t oversell web space.
• Business Blogs and Static Sites: If hosting few business blogs or static websites is all you’re planning to do, then any decent web hosting provider can cater to your needs perfectly well. Such blogs/sites require minimal hosting space, disk space, and monthly bandwidth.
• Ecommerce Stores: Hosting ecommerce sites is quite tedious. Due to involvement of extremely high amount selling and purchasing activities, a superior level of security and high speed must be maintained to ensure smooth operation of the site.

Beware of Overselling
As a part of the web hosting package you might have received a monthly bandwidth of 500GB but the chances are high that your website may be using only 20-40% of the allocated bandwidth. The same applies to most of the websites. Now that being said, the web hosting providers as also well aware of the fact that very few customers make full use of their disk space and monthly bandwidth limits. So, they oversell the web space on the web server. Problems tend to creep up as other customers start utilising more and more disk space and bandwidth. At some point of time, the resources used or rather required by all the customers cross the total resourceful available on web server. And, this is the point where overselling becomes a serious issue, and your site may be down due to outage of system resources. So, you must ensure that you business web hosting provider is not overselling the web space, but rather judiciously selling only what’s really available!

In a Nut-Shell
You should pick a web host, who not only provides business web hosting solutions at decent price, and has been in the business for a long time, but also one that ensures 99.9% uptime guarantee, and has a well versed customer support team that can resolve all the time in a timely manner. Beware of inexperienced players in the hosting arena, and those who oversell web space. It is advisable to read user reviews before you actually pick your business website hosting provider.