Modern businesses rely heavily upon an integrated approach to commerce; this includes a huge commitment to online presence. In fact if you look around, you will be unlikely to find a modern company that doesn’t have a dedicated website. A website which is we’ll constructed and user friendly can really benefit the sales and public perception of a company.
There are a great many points to cover off and issues to consider when building a website, one of which how it is going to be hosted, essentially where will it ‘live’. If you are a small start up business or a small on going concern then it will probably not be within your capabilities, financially, to have dedicated web hosting, like many other businesses you will have to share a server. This can have some drawbacks; there can be issues surrounding the other websites, which also use the same server. Search engines are fickle beasts and rely upon a degree of transparency and legitimacy in order to trust your site. One of the reasons that a site can be ‘sandboxed’ is due to negative associations on a server level, rather than there being anything wrong with the content or behaviour of the website.
Sandboxing is the process whereby you can loose your ranked position in a web search; SEO plays an important part in this and pulling oneself out of the ‘sandbox’ requires a degree of caution and care. Much like a game of chess, the website mustn’t be seen to be trying too hard to escape, rather remaining still and waiting for an opportunity to establish a link to a trusted site. The more of these strong links the better, and over time the website will regain its old position.
Moving away from the potential pitfalls of shared servers, those companies that can afford it and require it will strongly benefit from dedicated web hosting. Dedicated web hosting is a type of Internet hosting where the client leases an entire server not shared with anyone. This is more flexible than shared hosting, as organisations have full control over the server(s), including choice of operating system, hardware, etc.
Depending upon the size of the company and its offering to the consumer and its clients, the level of dedicated web hosting needs to satisfy all of these requirements. In general a dedicated web hosting package will contain benefits similar to the following:
- CPU: Dual core processor, 2.2 Ghz
- RAM: 1GB which is upgradeable to 8GB
- Storage: 160GB SATA
- Unmetered bandwidth – allowing for multiple media platforms to be running simultaneously
As well as these features you can also expect the following guarantees:
- 99.9% Network uptime
- 1 UK IP address
- No Long term contracts
- No Set up fees
There are of course a huge a variety of dedicated web hosting options; it all depends on the requirements of the company in question. This is where a period of consultancy is necessary, the majority of dedicated web hosting suppliers will have a support team and sales team that will be more than happy to talk you through the options and help you make the right choice for your company.