May 15

Written by: J.T. Smith
5/15/2008 5:48 PM

Now don’t get me wrong… I am not asking if your business is using the right, or best, Hosting Provider. This is not a question meant to get you to switch over to ViUX™ for hosting... assuming that we are not already hosting your site. Regardless of where your site is hosted, I am asking if you have considered what TYPE of hosting service you should be using for your business critical website.

Depending on how you look at it, there are basically four or five types of hosting service, which include: “Shared”, “VPS”, “Dedicated”, and “Complex” / “Custom”, as well as, possibly “Grid”. Because it is often the cheapest option (normally starting at less than $5 per month), most websites are hosted on some form of Shared Server; where several hundred (or far more) websites actually share the same server. But is a Shared Server the right option for a business critical website?

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Well before we attempt to answer that question, let’s determine exactly what a “business critical” website is. Does your website and/or domain e-mail either directly or indirectly provide needed revenue for your business? If you answer “Yes” to this question, then it is certainly true that your website is critical to your business. This being the case, selecting the wrong type of hosting for your site could prove to be a costly mistake.

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Five or six years ago there were really only two types of hosting service from which to choose… “Shared” and “Dedicated”. If you did not have several hundred dollars (or more) to spend on hosting each month, the choice was simple, you selected “Shared”. It was very expensive to have your own Dedicated Server, and Complex / Custom setups were far too expensive to even be considered by most. As such, it was hard for a business to justify going from paying something like $50 per month for Shared, to $500 + per month for Dedicated, with no good options in between.

While prices for Shared Hosting have dropped a great deal since then, Dedicated Hosting (at least with a decent server and network) remains out of the financial reach of many small businesses. As a result, those businesses cling to Shared Hosting when a FAR BETTER option now exists… VPS.

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VPS (Virtual Private Server) bridges  both the technological and financial gap between Shared and Dedicated Hosting, as it is actually a sort of hybrid of the two (see: Shared vs. VPS).

With a VPS your business can have its own private server (web, e-mail, and database) with full remote / root level access, the ability to install your own applications, guaranteed resource levels (i.e. CPU, Memory, Disk, Bandwidth, etc.) – none of which are available with Shared Hosting… all for less than a Dedicated Server and not much more than that of a Shared Server.

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So what is our advice to businesses when selecting hosting service? Simple… Don’t trust your business critical website hosting to a server with hundreds of other sites present (regardless of the provider), when for a small amount more per month, you can have a private server that hosts ONLY your site(s).

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