How to choose the best business web hosting service

By Mary Lin

Choosing business web hosting: When considering business web hosting, consumers must realize that the options that they will receive will be tremendously limited. business hosting is usually priced between $2 to $25 per month. This cheap pricing makes business web hosting more accessible to consumers who want to obtain an Internet presence for their individual interests or for the purposes of experimentation.

Lower price schemes however guarantee that the quality level of the business web hosting will be less than stellar. business web hosting can offer low prices because most take a "no-frills," bulk approach towards hosting. All business web hosting leverage shared hosting, in which numerous customer resources are multiplexed upon a single server.

In the case of most business web hosting providers, many hundreds of customers are located upon single servers or hosting appliances. The net result is that consumers experience a tremendous amount of service degradation in respect to server performance and network efficiency. With a multitude of consumers sharing a single server, any access to service is determined on a first-come, first-serve basis. In effect, consumers compete for all accessible services. Usually, this competition results in a tremendous amount of server load which causes tremendously slow execution of applications on the server, and high levels of latency, or network delay. Most business web hosting therefore cannot guarantee 24/7 uptime due to server load issues.

Many business hosts might also guarantee "unlimited bandwidth," or unlimited traffic to and from your Web site. Such claims are exaggerations since bandwidth is a finite resource that the business hosting company purchases from an upstream provider. Further, consumers must remember that the functionality of bandwidth is limited by server performance. If a Web server is inefficiently provisioned and has a large number of hosted Internet domains, that server's performance will become slow and impeded, and will even block requests for Web pages. If a Web server does not allow connections due to the sheer amount of traffic to the server, then the promise of "unlimited bandwidth" becomes effectively meaningless.

Since business hosts make smaller profit margins than regular hosts, which offer hosting in the $25 to $100 per month range, it can be expected that technical support and customer care functions will not be a high priority for a typical business host. With a business host making smaller margins, consumers can assume that that most of the revenue will be retained and not spent on support.

Most industry analysts however peg typical support costs at 30 per cent of a hosting company's revenue stream. Due to the smaller margins that a business host makes, consumers can deduce that much less human and capital resources will allocated to technical support. This can become a tremendous problem, since most business-hosting infrastructure is usually stretched to the limit. With a tremendous amount of server issues, due to its bulk approach towards hosting, consumers of such services can expect little effective support for a business host when a technical issue arises.

Good technical support provides quick response and definitive solutions to any problems that might crop up. This usually requires a good investment in customer relationship management and human resources, which business hosts most usually lack. business hosts therefore should never be considered for mission-critical e-commerce, or even for an Internet presence for a small or mid-sized business. The best use of business hosting service is for a small personal site or to evaluate and learn Internet technologies if you are a novice.