Business Hosting and Reliability

What resources must be available in a true business Web hosting account?

It is often the case that a website hosting company will offer various tiers of service. The most common demarcations in terms of hosting accounts are: entry level, business hosting, ecommerce hosting, and reseller accounts. The question is: “Why should I pay more for a business hosting account?”. Below are a few things to think about that may offer an explanation of what you get in a good business hosting account.

According to business hosting expert Daniel Foster, the first thing to look for in a true business account is greater resources. So for example if a ‘standard’ account comes with X amount of disk space, X amount of bandwidth, and X number of email boxes - then a business account from the same hosting provider should offer resources that are 2X or so better than the standard account. The reason for this is that businesses often require greater resources to run their accounts. They have more pages to their websites, attract more visitors per month, and need more email boxes for their employees.

The second thing to look for is fewer accounts per server with a business account. A good business hosting account will isolate all business accounts on the same server or server cluster. That way the hosting company can control the number of accounts that are provisioned onto each individual server. Why does this matter? In a shared hosting environment all accounts on the same server are sharing system resources. The fewer the accounts on the server - then presumably the fewer resources being tapped into at any given time. That means a few things: your site should be faster to load for site visitors, scripts and order forms should be faster, and the likelihood of downtime is reduced. Also - by running the server well below it’s maximum rated performance, it is likely the server will simply run better and last longer between incidents.

Another benefit of being on a business hosting server with only other business accounts is that the chance of a rogue script or malicious activity is dramatically reduced. This is because businesses are much more aware of what is happening to their accounts, what scripts they are running, and keeping up with security issues. Even if you are a great customer and never introduce any bad scripts on your site - you are always subject to others on the server hogging all the system resources - unless you move up to a dedicated server or VPS hosting account.

Businesses may get better service than standard account holders. It is the case at many hosting companies that support tickets and calls are placed in a queue in order of importance or urgency. One way of ordering such support queues is simply by account type. So if you have a business hosting account, you will be placed higher in the support queue than a standard hosting account support ticket. This makes sense for the hosting company because business hosting customers are spending more money and have the potential to bring in more additional business than individual shared accounts.