Advantages and Disadvantages of Business Hosting

Advantages of Business Hosting

If you are looking for a new home for your existing business site, or if you are just delving into online business, it is important to have a business hosting plan that fits your needs and can continue to do so in the future. There are many advantages to purchasing a business hosting plan, even if you do not particularly need all of the features associated with one.

First, business hosting plans typically offer a great deal of features that are necessary to doing business online. These features range from free shopping carts, applications for business use, mailing list software, SSL certificates, and unlimited databases. Even if you don’t have an ecommerce site, your site may still benefit from a secure area, or mailing list software.

Site promotion tools are usually included in business hosting plans, which can be very useful in getting your site listed on popular search engines. Instead of having to pay extra for these tools, you can simply find a host that bundles them in with a site package, saving you money.

Companies that cater to businesses typically offer more support options. This is usually because these companies know that in order to keep high profile business clients they need to provide a level of service that is above and beyond a usual hosting company. If you need more technical support options, or a host that offers 24-hour support, you can usually find several that offer business hosting plans that fit this description.

If you need sub-domains for your site, business hosting plans will normally include this feature. A sub-domain is a great way to organize your site’s content and content areas, making your job easier to keep track of all of the aspects of your site. A sub-domain will typically look something like this: http://subdomain.yoursitesurl.com If you plan on having an online store or a catalog, this is a very useful way to separate your content area from your store’s catalog.

Domain aliases are another feature is typically included. This means that you can have several domain names or variations of your domain name that all point to one location. Instead of having to park multiple domains, you can have them all point to the same location, saving you money.

If you want to keep track of your site statistics, business hosting plans usually offer more site analysis tools that can give you a very good idea of your site’s popularity. This is very important for sites that need to track promotional campaigns, click-throughs and other aspects of traffic that need to be analyzed.

There are also some disadvantages that are inherent with business hosting. Let’s take a look at some of these disadvantages to see if they will affect your decision.

Disadvantages of Business Hosting

Although business hosting can offer you greater amounts of features in one area, they can be lacking in other important facets that may be important for your website. Before you make your decision, here are some important disadvantages to keep in the front of your mind.

First, you will need to make sure that your hosting company supports the database format that you are using. While business hosting plans usually do support most databases, it is important to make sure that your database is compatible before making your decision.

Some companies do not offer hosting packages that support Access databases, and others don’t offer support for SQL databases. Instead of having to convert your databases, which can be costly and time consuming, it is easier to find the right business hosting company that supports your database format.

Business hosting plans, while offering a number of features, usually don’t offer unlimited email addresses. Many regular hosting plans offer a large amount or unlimited amount of email addresses that can be associated with your account. If your company needs more than 50 email addresses, this can be a large problem.

In addition to a lesser amount of email addresses, disk space amounts and data transfer amounts are usually lower with business hosting plans. Since business hosting plans focus on different features, this area is usually one that suffers the most.

The cost of business hosting is typically much higher than general or budget hosting. This is due to the features that are offered, such as shopping carts and other tools that would otherwise not be free. Since they are bundled in with your account, you will usually have to pay more for these features than you would for a site that offered just a basic place to host your site.

Cost is an area that can fluctuate greatly, and can be a very large disadvantage. On the same token, there are many general hosting companies that are offering the same kind of features associated with business hosting accounts for much less money. It is important to research all of your options to make sure that you are getting the most amount of features for the least amount of money.

While most business hosting companies offer SSL or secure socket layer, for secure transactions from an online store, they may not be compatible with your merchant account gateway. You will need to check with both your hosting company and your merchant account to make sure that your gateway is supported before you select your hosting company. This is an area that cannot be fixed or worked around, so it is important to take the time to ensure compatibility ahead of time.