Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Small Business Web Hosting: How To Choose

By David Wilson

If you are a small business owner, you're probably very aware of how much having a good web presence can boost your business. To find and keep customers, you need a good reliable web presence.

If you don't have good hosting, you can't have these reliable web presence. Most shared hosting providers host personal, not business, sites, so you might not get the best service.

By checking with other customers of a hosting company, you can determine their level of support. You will probably have to pay more, but its hard to put a price on reliability and solid support.

Another thing you need to be considering is the type of hosting you want to get. Shared hosts are popular but not often the best choice for businesses. It is slower and less reliable than some of the other options.

If you're a small business looking to grow, check out VPS, or virtual private hosting. With a VPS, you are leasing rights to a virtual machine that runs on a cluster of computers.

A big benefit of this is that your server's capabilities can be increased at any time by simply upgrading your rate. This upgrading happens right away, which is why these are perfect for small businesses.

If you're looking for the ultimate in performance and reliability, though, a dedicated server is what you'll want. Dedicated web hosting is a big market. These give you your own machine. However, upgrading is hard since you'll typically have to migrate your site to an all new machine. This adds more complication than you'd probably like to deal with. Still, these are the fastest and most reliable hosting options.

Overall, the most important thing to get right when choosing small business web hosting is the support. The other factors matter, but support trumps them all. Best of luck to your small business endeavors! - 15246

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