Control Freak - The Real Benefits Of Controlling Your Own Business Web Hosting

To many people, the difference between web hosts is something unseen and unconsidered - a service provided by men and machinery tucked away in a basement and one which only becomes an issue once it’s become a problem.

A head of department looking to trim a budget will consider any means of doing so, but the old adage ‘buy cheap, buy twice’ is worth particular consideration when it comes to sourcing hosts for your website and email providers. The world’s most creative and intuitive website may as well be a bricked up window to a company if it is unavailable, and the account advisors, sales team, dispatch and shipping are all supported by what you have in place to keep your site up and running.

These days, businesses rarely stop. Business never does. Somewhere there is always somebody 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.

Dedicated Security

If reliability is a key factor to consider when deciding whom to trust with your company’s online presence, then it must also go hand in hand with security.

The average web hosting company provides for hundreds of websites, sometimes thousands. In any group that size, in any area you choose to focus on, there will be the full range of personality types – cautious and security conscious, reckless and disorganized - those who wear belt and braces and those who are at risk of losing their shirt.

The concern when sharing with all of them is how quickly their problems become your problems if something goes wrong. Dedicated servers are the private garages of the web hosting world, exclusive options that seem like an extravagance until you’re picking up the bill for someone else’s crash.

Even worse than accidents are the crimes. It’s a fairly regular occurrence to see the headline ‘personal data loss’, phishing scams or hacktivist attacks that take private customer data and disseminates it across the internet. Medical records, bank details, addresses and phone numbers are something that most businesses will access as part of their day to day activities. With a legal requirement to guarantee customer security, any lapses in security can become not only immensely costly but, on occasion, fatal for a business.

Bad recycling, good redundancy

Keeping costs down is a universal aspect of business, and that includes those who work in web hosting. Reducing equipment costs enables some organisations to offer bargain basement hosting prices, frequently by using recycled equipment and running whatever operating system causes the least hassle and requires the fewest employees. Backups may be performed, but with large numbers of clients, these may not be frequent, and the cost of additional backups to power supply and other hardware might not be deemed conducive to profit making.

Choosing a dedicated server enables an active business to choose precisely how their hosting is managed, on independent equipment, in a controlled environment. Redundancies are 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.

Are you dedicated?

Ultimately, any choice of web hosting partner by its nature becomes a reflection of the company it is providing the service for. Admittedly this reflection is not always apparent to the customer and any inability to find what a user is looking for due to a website being down is generally blamed on the owners of the website, rather than the hosting company that isn’t picking up their service calls.

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 all areas of their online infrastructure are optimized for performance and security, is worth ‘every piece-of-mind penny’.