Small businesses require reliable web hosting services to ensure existing and potential clients are able to locate them easily via popular search engines. New companies cannot operate profitably and successfully without dedicated hosting services for their domains. They require the following services from the hosting company:

Dedicated Servers
Web hosting providers should run your website on dedicated servers that operate on either Linux or Windows operating systems. Such servers will guarantee users full access to your site with optimum up time.

You might have spent heavily on design and customization of your domain, but an unreliable host can cause its demise. Online users do not waste time on sites that take ages to load and respond. You might end up losing a substantial number of potential customers and clients besides denting the credibility of your business.

Round the Clock Monitoring and Security
Online businesses do not shut their doors but serve worldwide customers and clients day and night. It is therefore essential to have a web hosting company that monitors domains functionality and security concerns round the clock.

Full time Technical Support
Even the most advanced technology goes haywire at times and requires repair and configuration by experts. Small online businesses have to shoulder this risk during their operations.

Nonetheless, web hosting companies should keep disruptions at a bare minimum, and deal with incidences forthwith. The hosting company should offer twenty-four hour support services for the website. Ideal providers are available at all times even during holidays, which ironically are the busiest days for online businesses.

Back up Services
A reliable web hosting company offers complete back up facilities for your server, website and database files. Back up is part of baseline security measures that enable swift restoration of your site in case of a mishap. It can take more time to restore your website from a remote server than from the hosts computers.

Numerous small businesses rely on the internet to sustain their upkeep. Web hosting services are critical to the success of such businesses. They are responsible for operating and maintaining the website on a round the clock basis. Hence, they must offer services such as dedicated servers, monitoring and security, and twenty-four hour support services for clients websites.

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In our previous blog, we looked at some of the broad issues that you need to consider when deciding whether to opt for shared or dedicated web hosting. Today, we’ll look at some of the specific advantages and disadvantages of these two options.

Shared web hosting

Low cost

Shared web hosting is cheap – certainly, most UK web hosting companies offer packages from as little as £2/month including a free domain name and support.

Purchase-to-launch speed

If you have a ready website, shared hosting will allow you to launch it within minutes. Simply visit a web hosting provider’s website, choose and pay for a package and pretty much instantly you’ll receive your FTP login details allowing you to upload and launch your website immediately.

Shared IP

Every server connected to the Web has a unique IP address – a unique identity if you like.  This means that if there are a number of websites co-hosted on a server, they will all have the same IP address. Generally, this is not a problem.

However, if a co-hosted website was to persistently send out spam, the whole server could be blacklisted and effectively disabled taking your and all other co-hosted websites offline.

This is where you need to satisfy yourself that your web hosting company doesn’t host potentially spamming sites and also has robust monitoring software and procedures to ensure that any abusive activity is prevented before it impacts your website.

Speed / responsiveness

The more websites that are hosted on a server, the more requests that server has to deal with. Let’s say there are 20 websites hosted on a single server. If all those are currently being viewed by users, all requests for pages from those websites effectively have to queue up and be fulfilled in turn.

Now in reality, for small businesses with limited traffic (thousands of visitors per day) there is no noticeable change in performance. However, if many of these co-hosted websites were attracting tens-of-thousands of visitors per day, then it may well take a few extra second to load website pages. It is then perfectly possible that your customers will not wait around for pages of your website to load and may click away to your competitors.

Bandwidth and storage

While both of these elements will have set limits under shared hosting, most web hosting companies will allow you to increase these or upgrade to a higher package as your needs change.

Certainly, neither bandwidth nor storage hinder website performance. If you reach the limits of your package your web hosting company should automatically inform you and give you the opportunity to either reduce your usage / storage or simply upgrade.

SSL

Whether you have an ecommerce website or you simply capture customer details through your website, you will need to ensure that any information entered by your customers is encrypted. For this you will need SSL (secure sockets layer) encryption. It keeps data secure and also inspires confidence in your customers.

For shared hosting, a shared SSL encryption seems to the most common solution. In most cases, this is perfectly fine.

However, individual SSL encryption on shared servers can pose set-up challenges. It is, therefore, best to discuss this with your web hosting company to ensure that your needs can be fully met.

In summary, for the vast majority of small business websites including those with significant traffic, shared hosting is a perfect solution. It is certainly the right choice to start with and upgrade as your needs change. Eventually, you may well need to consider dedicated hosting.

In Part III, we will take a look at dedicated hosting in a little more detail.

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For many businesses, their website is the single most important point of contact with their current and future customers. And for most small businesses the responsibility of ensuring that their website is always up and available rests in the hands of their web hosting company.

In other words, whether or not your latest promotion is seen by your customers and prospects may be determined by the quality of service provided by your web hosting company.

Equally importantly, the type of hosting you choose may also determine the smooth running and responsiveness of your website.

Broadly speaking, there are two types of web hosting options – shared or dedicated.

Put simply, shared hosting is where your web hosting company hosts your website together with many others websites on a single server. Dedicated hosting, on the other hand, is where only your website sits on an individual server.

While both options have their respective advantages and disadvantages, for most small businesses, shared hosting is a perfectly good choice.

However, before you go ahead and buy shared hosting, you will need to ask your web hosting company a number of questions. How many other websites are likely to be hosted on the server? What happens in the event that you exceed your bandwidth or storage space? What sort of control measures are in place to stop your co-hosted websites from spamming and potentially getting the server blacklisted?

Of course, you may also want to consider where your web host is based. Certainly, for many UK businesses, a UK web hosting company is critical as they want to be confident of getting help as and when they need it.

Now, given the ever-improving nature of hardware and software, shared hosting will meet the demands of most small businesses and it is highly unlikely that you will see disruption to your service. As long as you can satisfy yourself with the support on offer from your web hosting company, we are confident that shared hosting option will prove to be both an effective and a profitable choice.

In the next blog, we will look at shared and dedicated hosting in a little more detail to help you make a more informed decision about your hosting package and your web hosting company.

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