Introduction

Business Owners have so many factors that they must consider and running a business involves a lot of careful planning. If you conduct some of your business online, offer a company website or an ecommerce business, it is essential that one of your factors to be well planned out is who to select as your web hosting provider.

You may not think of it this way, but your web host can have a major impact on your success. If your website is not reliable or they do not provide as close to perfect uptime as possible, your business can suffer. It is also essential to be certain that you choose the type of hosting that best suits the need of your customers.

Types of Hosting

Before selecting a web-hosting provider, you will need to determine what type of web hosting services you need. There are four main categories from which to choose: shared hosting, co-location hosting, and dedicated hosting that is not managed and managed dedicated hosting.

Shared hosing is the most affordable hosting service available. A hosting provider will host more than one website on a single server. This is an affordable way to host your website and is quite often effective. However, since there are several websites on one server, there can be a high level of traffic on that server and therefore, this sometimes impacts on the performance of your website.

If you do not want to share a server with other websites you have several other hosting options. You can utilize collocated hosting. In this case, you will buy your own server. Your sever will then be placed in a network for the hosting provider you provide. The host’s only responsibility is maintaining their network. You would be responsible for all technical issues and maintenance for the server. This is not often the best choice for a business if you do not have the technical knowledge and do not employ anyone who does.

Dedicated hosting is an option for those businesses that have the money to spend each month. When you sign up for dedicated hosting, you are essentially leasing a server from a hosting provider. This form of hosting will provide you with a website that has a high level of performance and reliability. There are two types of dedicated hosting; unmanaged and managed. With unmanaged dedicated hosting, you will only receive basic support. This is again may not be the best option if you nor your employees can manage and maintain your hosting services.

For high performance hosting that includes skilled support for your services, consider managed hosting. Again you will be leasing a server but in this case the host will provide you with a high level of customer support. They will also be responsible for maintaining your server. If there is a problem with your hosting, the provider will solve the issues for you. This can help to save you time and money, not too mention customers. If you were to have hosting difficulties and did not have the knowledge to fix them or the support of a host, your website could be offline or have a poor performance. This could result in a negative impression of your company. This is certainly not something you want.