An understanding of one’s business model and processes and in the manner that these are being translated into the functionality of the business’s website should provide a partial insight on how to best come up with the optimized choice in terms of what the web hosting requirements and conditions should fit for the business. You must choose the web hosting company that provides the most granularities of choices in terms of software’s and configurations, hardware compute power, security and reliability.
There is no optimized one-size fits-all solution here, and the solution that claims to be such is most probably an overkill of what is actually needed. To help you find the holy grail solution of your web hosting requirements, you must both understand your own side’s business model and what the other side of the web hosting company model has to offer. As not all web hosting companies are created equal, the following are glimpse description of what to look for in the list of services offered by a web hosting company.
Let us take a look from the perspective of the types of solutions offered by web hosting companies. These solutions could fall under two main categories: full-featured hosting, and application-specific hosting. The full-featured hosting has four sub-categories under it: dedicated hosting service, virtual private service, collocation facilities service and cloud hosting service. The application-specific hosting has five popular sub-categories: web hosting service, e-mail hosting service, DNS hosting service, game servers and wiki farms. You must inquire the web hosting company for the offering of these services and choose the one that fits your current business needs.
It is sometimes beneficial to be informed and to understand what the web hosting company has interesting solutions to offer rather than brute forcing our own familiar business requirement in a one-way direction towards the web hosting company. In a dedicated hosting service, the web hosting company owns all the resources including the administration and maintenance of these resources both hardware and software.
Does your business website require a particular piece of hardware attached to the web hosting company’s servers? Does your business needs other special software add-ons aside from the default in the web hosting’s environment? How is confidential information and intellectual property protected? Do you need to have a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) signed by your web hosting company?
Another web hosting service, the collocation facilities service offering is an interesting solution. The web hosting company only provides just the internet connection, uninterruptible power supply and air-conditioned controlled environment, but let your business fulfill its requirements by bringing your own hardware computers into the location and you can do all your own system administration under these conditions.
A more familiar offering, the cloud hosting services is probably the most flexible of all. It is like the services offering of electricity or water supply that we all are familiar with. It is not a flat pay per month. Instead, in this offering you only pay for the time and space used, and in this model your business can be quickly scaled up or down as your business requirements
change.
These are only the few among the many to consider when deciding what web hosting company to go for based on the services they provide and how these services fulfill your own business requirements.
