Business hosting packages are guaranteed to offer a high level of uptime so that your website will always be available to your visitors whilst also offering a high level of security so that you can keep the data that you are hosting safe and secure. Any good web hosting company will have safeguards in place to ensure that only legitimate businesses are provided with business hosting packages to make sure that no hackers or other potential threats are able to gain any form of access to the hosting servers. Business hosting services are available in different forms, although all are designed to maximize the uptime and security available; the most popular business hosting services tend to be clustered hosting services because they are reliable yet very affordable, whilst dedicated servers are reserved for larger businesses and those with bigger budgets. Business web hosting packages will always vary in price depending on your chosen form of web hosting, but you need to remember that the costs are usually justified when you consider that your website probably brings you a certain level of business and if your website was to become unavailable because of whatever reason, this is going to mean lost revenue for you.
Windows Business Hosting
Windows is the preferred operating system of most larger businesses because of the features that it has to offer as well as the support for advance Microsoft applications that isn’t offered by other web hosting platforms. A Windows business hosting package will be able to offer you support for Microsoft Exchange Server mailboxes that will allow you to increase the efficiency of your employees’ communication; Microsoft Exchange Server will also make it easier for your employees to manage themselves through the use of the built in calendar and contact manager. A Windows business hosting service can also offer support for your websites that have been developed using classic ASP and ASP.NET, both of which are widely used for the development of scalable web applications. ASP.NET is the more modern of the two and is used by many large corporations for web applications that are used as part of their main business meaning that they are usually mission critical to a good extent. Microsoft SQL Server databases are also supported by Windows business hosting packages and this is a database server that is used to power the database backends of business websites as well as the internal infrastructures of most businesses.
Linux Business Hosting
The alternative to Windows business hosting is Linux business hosting, although it is still the same form of web hosting, Linux is an entirely different operating system to Linux and so the features of your web hosting service will be different. Linux is an open source operating system meaning that you can easily expect any Linux business web hosting package to be cheaper than its Windows equivalent, providing a good argument for considering Linux hosting over Windows hosting if you feel that you don’t want to be spending too much on your web hosting services. Linux is the best operating system to use for PHP hosting and MySQL hosting because it can provide you with the best web hosting environment for both of these technologies; if you have developed a dynamic website using these two technologies then you will probably find that your website will be very responsive and function as you want it to when hosted on a Linux hosting environment. Linux is also known for being a lot more reliable than Windows, although depending on the form of web hosting that you choose to use you are going to experience a high level of reliability anyway; but at the end of the day, the reliability and stability of your server is going to be measured by how well you manage it.
Clustered Hosting
A clustered hosting package will have its services spread across several different servers which will be beneficial to you as it helps to maximize the level of uptime provided; because there are several servers in a hosted cluster, downtime can be easily kept to a minimum – that’s if it even poses a problem. The idea of clustered hosting is to provide a reliable hosting service at a low cost because although several servers are involved, clustered hosting can be seen as being a form of shared web hosting also because there are usually many shared hosting accounts hosted in a single cluster. Windows clustered hosting services and Linux clustered hosting services are both available, providing you with a good level of choice when choosing the hosting platform that you feel will meet your needs. Clustered hosting packages can provide a reasonable alternative to dedicated server hosting in some situations where 100% uptime is being guaranteed, although you will also need to review the resource allocations that are being offered as well as the optional extras.
Dedicated Server Hosting
If you are a larger business then a dedicated server may be more fitting for your requirements than a clustered hosting service. Dedicated servers are a popular form of business hosting because they are able to provide a high level of uptime, coupled with the fact that you won’t have to share any portion of your server’s resources with any other users unless you wish to. During the order process you are able to customize dedicated servers to meet your exact resource requirements as well as being given the choice between Windows and Linux.
In conclusion, business hosting packages come in different forms and because your business website is going to be integral to the running of your business, you are going to want to be sure that you choose the right hosting service for your business. The support offered by your chosen web hosting company should also be something that you consider because if something goes wrong with your business web hosting service, you want to be sure that you can have it sorted in a short amount of time to reduce the impact that it could have on the uptime of your website.