Web Hosting for Online Business

Have you ever wondered why the kind of professional web hosting you have can influence whether your online business succeeds or fails? Discover how it can make or break your website's chances of generating wealth in this fascinating article that tells it like it is!

Whether you like it or not, having a web presence for your business is no longer a luxury. It's a necessity!

It may surprise you to learn that not all businesses are set up to have a website that compliments their brick and mortar dealings. Many businesses started life as a simple website that grew into highly profitable income generators for their owners.

Many entrepreneurs have discovered that a website can turn into a veritable goldmine in the right hands. But it's not simply a case of creating a great looking website and then sitting back waiting for the money to start rolling in.

A Home for a Website

A website is merely a collection of virtual pages that display on a web browser on a computer. What goes onto those pages is up to the owner. But that site is not going to be seen by anyone unless it has a place to anchor it online.

That place is a web hosting server. This is just another computer that stores the files that make up a website in a certain way, then connects to the ether via certain protocols across a telecommunications network that comprises the world wide web.

There are numerous companies that provide web hosting services and these differ in price depending on the level of service required by the website owner.

For example, a very small, simple website of a few pages may only require a small amount of disk storage space, low bandwidth and a relatively unassuming processor to enable it to render adequately on a browser anywhere in the world.

On the other hand, a large, popular site that may have a large number of images, video or audio files associated with it will need a much greater level of storage space, higher bandwidth to cope with a higher level of visitor traffic and a fast processor to handle its user-interactive applications.

Size Matters

When it comes to providing a reliable portal for visitors that may also be your customers, in the case of an e-commerce website, a reliable and high spec web hosting server is essential to the success of that site and the business it provides a store-front to. Skimping on hosting can cost a business dearly in lost sales and visitors that reach for the "back" button on their browser when a page takes ages to load up.

So it is important to ensure that you choose the right size of server for your hosting needs. It is also important that your webhost provides the ability to expand and grow as your website's needs grow.

Choosing a Hosting Provider

Not all hosting providers are made equal. Many of the low end providers sell cheap shared hosting where many hundreds or even thousands of websites are hosted on a single server in their own tiny partitions.

This is fine for small, uncomplicated websites that don't get a lot of visitor traffic. But as soon as one website on such a server suddenly gets a heavy spike of traffic, it can literally take the whole server down and all th other websites with it (at least until the tech support people can fix the problem). This can means your site goes down for several minutes or even hours.

Imagine how many sales you could lose in that time as potential customers find your site in the search engine and click on it to see what you have to offer, only to discover a blank page or a message telling them your site is down!

Reseller Hosting

Luckily, the better hosting providers have scaled up packages for website owners whose needs for better uptime and service level are greater. There are reseller packages which provide the ability for users to host many websites on a larger partition of a server with more resilience should another user cause problems with traffic spikes or software glitches.

VPS Hosting

For those that need even more power for their sites, there is the Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting solution. This provides a large partition on a server that mimics a fully dedicated solution but at a fraction of the cost. On this type of host, you can expand as your needs grow and you will only ever be sharing a server with a handful of other VPS clients.

That means the likelihood of downtime through unusual traffic spikes or software problems is greatly reduced and you have fuller control over how your websites are catered for with regards to software additions and increased user interaction. This kind of webhost comes in a fully managed package where full support is provided, or an unmanaged package for clients that have software developer skills and are fully conversant with the workings of a webhosting server.

Dedicated Hosting

At the top of the scale for a website's needs is a dedicated server. This is literally having a whole computer to yourself that no one else is sharing. That means you are solely responsible for the traffic that comes to your site and the software that you run. Like a VPS, this kind of webhost comes in managed or unmanaged depending on your level of expertise.

This kind of solution also comes with the biggest price tag and that cost will keep growing depending on how much processing power, bandwidth and storage you require. From the business end, you get what you pay for and if your business needs are great, then you must pay more to enable that business to shine.

Most businesses will generate sufficient income to justify the cost of hosting. The more your business makes, the better level of hosting you can afford and will require to keep the business growing.

Can You Save Money on Web Hosting?

Naturally, many hosts will attract business by offering discounts and money off coupons so it pays to be on the lookout for them. In our example, we know one of the biggest hosting companies. Hostgator, routinely offers a variety of money off coupons with savings of as much as 25% off the cost of a 3 year hosting plan..

This can represent a hefty saving over the regular cost for that period of time. They have discounts on all their packages from small shared accounts through resellers, VPS and dedicated accounts. You can find one such 25% off Hostgator coupon by clicking that link.