If you are a business owner looking for business hosting services, but not aware of the recent advancements, you may require some help in deciding on the right kind of web hosting service for your business. There are a range of options to choose from, which primarily include shared hosting, Virtual Private Servers (VPS), and dedicated servers. And, then of course there are sub-classifications such as managed server hosting, semi-dedicated hosting and more.
Understanding the Ever-changing Hosting Needs of Business
Now, it’s important to understand that the hosting needs of a business will continue to change as it grows over time. During the initial stages, shared hosting would be a good choice to consider. The main reason for this is the cost-effectiveness since a lot of websites share the same server space. This affordability factor is what makes it suitable for small businesses in the initial stages. Secondly, when you kick-off your business, you may require fewer server resources, but as time goes by, you might require more resources due to increase in traffic levels, and in turn, the bandwidth requirements of your website and web apps, and the server resources too.
Making a Switch to VPS
Well, when you outgrow the shared hosting limits, it is time to switch over to VPS – it’s as simple as that. When you move on to VPS, it gives your site more room to grow. It allows customers to personalize the way in which, the server functions. You can never expect such features from a shared server. Furthermore, VPS can handle the unplanned traffic surges, and offer you significantly higher bandwidth.
The downside of shared hosting is that your resources are confined, increasing the risk of your site crashing due to unexpectedly high surge in traffic levels. But, this drawback is overcome in case of VPS, as there is no need to deal with such a problem, because you don’t share the server with too many other sites.
So, as a business grows bigger, it would require more security and the business owner won’t be able to afford an unexpected crash, and at that point, an upgrade to dedicated server becomes almost a necessity!
Taking the Leap to Dedicated Server
Now, moving the focus to taking the big leap to a dedicated server, the biggest factor that influences this decision is size of your website, and your budget. A big website will need plenty of disk space and it may sometimes outgrow the limits of VPS hosting after a certain point of time.
A dedicated server again becomes a necessity for big organizations that do business on the Internet, and simply can’t afford 5 minutes of downtime. The amount of bandwidth that you require will also largely determine whether or not you would need a dedicated server, but you can’t decide this based on the number of visitors to your site alone.
Added Security
Finally, a dedicated server can provide more security and more freedom in terms of managing your website. However, the high cost is the biggest disadvantage of this kind of hosting in addition to the fact that you would be solely responsible for managing the server too.
Investing big money on a dedicated server becomes a necessity as your business requirements continue to grow. It may seem hard to find out the right time to make the changeover from one kind of hosting to the other, but a close monitoring of your business and consideration of the key factors will help you in making this decision at the most appropriate time.
Having seen the things from a business owner’s perspective, you can obviously learn a lot of things as a host too. For instance, if you’ve got 100 shared hosting customers, then it’s quite likely that at least 30 of them would need to make an upgrade to VPS over the next 12 months. Likewise, out of 100 VPS, at least 20 are likely to make a switch to dedicated server. And, if you manage to keep your customers satisfied, you’re almost assured of healthy growth every year.