As online business continues to expand at record levels, websites facilitating digital power players are growing ever larger, more complex and more sophisticated. These days, businesses rarely stop.
Business never does. Somewhere someone is always looking for a product or service and the omnipresent nature of the online world means that there is always someone ready to supply it.
The time it takes to go back from an unresponsive link and select the next result from a search engine can be measured in nanoseconds and the truth is, the world’s most creative and intuitive website may as well be a bricked up window to a company if it is unavailable.
Account advisers, sales team, dispatch and shipping are all supported by what a business has in place to keep their website up and running.
To the majority of business owners themselves, the difference between web hosts with their various shared or dedicated package delineations and hardware specifications, mean little, if anything.
These are services unseen and unconsidered – provided by men and machinery tucked away in a basement and only becoming an issue if there is a problem.
For those in IT departments however, the demands being put on them to ensure optimal performance, 100% security and all-but infinite and immediate scalability, is higher than ever and slip ups can register in eye-watering company losses.
It remains the case though, that for any businesses expenditure, whether it be on a new office chair or new hosting solution for the company website, measuring cost versus requirement will always be an important, if not ‘the’ most important consideration and this is perhaps more relevant now than ever before.
Web Hosting – To Save Or Not To Save?
Due to reduced storage and bandwidth requirements, as well as a what can be significant cost saving, the majority of small to medium-sized businesses will use a shared hosting solution, whereby their website will be held on a server shared by others.
While these solutions are commonly secure and offer a level of adaptability suitable for smaller businesses, there will be control and service restrictions.
While the majority of restrictions – i.e. requiring specific software not available in shared hosting – would be of little concern for smaller online businesses, for larger, high turnover business with resource intensive websites, any break from optimal performance and total control can represent a very real threat to profits.
Are You Dedicated?
Dedicated servers are the private garages of the web hosting world – secure, reliable, stable and able to be utilised in any way required.
Although a more expensive solution, they enable active, growing business to choose precisely how their hosting is managed, on independent equipment, in a controlled environment with redundancies in place to ensure increased business can always be accommodated and web traffic surges – that might overload a server running close to capacity – are managed efficiently.
Companies can be agile and adapt as they expand with full root/administrator access which means a server can be customised and configurations optimized for the specific needs of a business, the types of applications they want to run and the amount of information they want to stream.
Ultimate Control
While shared hosting services, and the associated cost savings those solutions offer, undoubtedly suit some company set ups, for others, a dedicated solution which ensures beyond doubt that a business has ultimate control and that all areas of their online infrastructure are optimized for performance and security, stability and scalability, is worth every single penny.
