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Business Web Hosting
Business Web Hosting, when you get specific, means capacity, features, and occasional legal factors. The legals of business web hosting revolve around state and federal laws about types of businesses, international laws for interstate conduct of same, and the contract you sign agreeing not to operate certain kinds of business. If these factors apply, they’ll determine where you host your business web site.
The rest – the features and capacity – determines which web hosting provider you’ll buy from, and what kind of plan you’ll buy. Business web hosting can mean anything:
From web catalogs and checkout systems for retail store fronts, to drop shipping;
From a restaurant menu or 6-page brochure, to huge business-to-business vendor systems;
From ring tone sales and games, to business web hosting resellers serving local clients;
From your favorite radio station’s listener forum, to global networks of every kind;
…and everything in between.
Breakdown of business web hosting options: The options for business web hosting are broad enough to cover all the above, and more. For small business, with limited needs such as printable menus or online brochures, shared web hosting may suffice. For total control, and enough horsepower to be a global or cultural contender, confident businesses often upgrade to dedicated web hosting. For most everything in between, there’s the Virtual Private Server, or VPS.
Why not buy business web hosting? If you have a business, you need a web site. If hiring tech help to accomplish that is outside your budget, some hosting firms make it easy to create basic web sites – much easier than using a word processor!
What to expect from business web hosting: When you buy business web hosting, you’re buying into the potential to double your business efforts – almost any effort you’d care to make – by making digital versions to serve your customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
The key is choosing the right plan, and using it. Whatever business hosting plan you use, it’ll hand out your restaurant’s menu any time of day; it’ll answer your customers’ commonly-asked questions, and hand out contact information, without interrupting your secretary; it’ll sell products and services while you sleep… if you choose wisely, and use your business web hosting asset to the fullest.
Bottom line: Like any other decision about a business expense, you can expect to get what you buy. Business web hosting is a technical asset, with different classes of plans, choices of features, and so-forth. A skilled sales agent might sell you the equivalent of a warehouse plus a fleet of trucks, when all you need is a few bicycle messengers worth of hosting power.
Prepare to make the right business hosting purchase – read about the three main classes of web hosting plans before you even start to shop. They are: shared web hosts, Virtual Private Servers, and dedicated web hosting. It’s more complicated than ”small / medium / large.” There are many ways to save money on business web hosting, just by understanding the offers.
Costs: Prices range widely. Business web hosting options start at negligible cost – shared hosting, US $2-5 per month, just the basics. At the high end, a reasonably-priced dedicated server costs US $100-300 per month. That’s less than most retail stores’ electric bills, for the powerful kinds of business web hosting huge international companies rely on.