A small business that has an office and no physical retail store must decide what web hosting makes sense for them. Perhaps their hosting requirements are quite small because they sell only through third-party sites like Amazon.com or they offer digital services through their website.
On the other hand, they could have e-commerce sales where visitors come to their site and buy through a shopping cart. In which case, during business hours, their website could slow down considerably if it doesn’t have powerful enough web hosting behind it.
Here we look at what hosting makes sense for small businesses.
Shared hosting is a suitable solution for small businesses that don’t have many website visitors every month. A few thousand visitors spread fairly evenly over a month is likely going to be very suitable. The difficulty comes into play when a site needs to load quickly for impatient visitors or starts to see many people attempting to visit on a single day. This would then go beyond the capabilities of most shared plans.
With a shared hosting plan, many websites are hosted on just one server. While there are practical limits placed on each site hosted on the server, sometimes other sites just get busier and the server slows down. For companies even with low demand, their hosting can become slower too until the host gets things back under control again. It’s up to each business to decide whether they want to run that risk or opt for faster, higher capacity VPS hosting instead.
Managed VPS Hosting for More Dependable, Faster Performance
With a VPS server, you get a portion of the resources of that server. That means, even if the server has 20GB’s of RAM installed, your virtual server might receive 2GBs of that allocation on a small VPS hosting plan. Other site owners will get access to most of the rest.
Each VPS plan is different. There are ones with more bandwidth and greater RAM to keep up with demand and not run out of bandwidth when the site become popular. There are others that are tricked out with more CPU cores to run at a swift pace. Each business can decide what their needs are and choose a plan that provides for them.
Dedicated Hosting for E-commerce
Businesses that sell their own products or those of other manufacturers tend to have busy websites. Depending on how successful the business is, it’s not uncommon to see a few thousand visitors every day, or more. At this point, a dedicated hosting plan is worth looking into. It provides greater access to the types of resources needed. Bandwidth will need to be purchased to pay for the total usage as it can ramp up and become costly. Therefore, a company must factor in the total hosting bill set against their pricing to ensure they meet their profit targets.
While it’s possible to have the option to increase the capacity of a web hosting package as needed, buying more hosting than a company presently requires is wasteful. However, when moving up to an advanced plan isn’t easily achieved, then it might make sense to use a hosting plan that leaves a little in the tank. This way should traffic rise because of good press, then the website won’t go down.