Virtually every business today, from the smallest local operation to the largest international one, needs to have a presence on the web. Corporations of a certain size, of course, have whole departments dedicated to creating and maintaining these assets or can afford to hire highly-skilled contractors to do so. Owners and operators of small businesses, on the other hand, rarely have such luxuries and are often confronted with budgets tight enough that they need to make every dollar count. Thinking about a few things when researching business hosting plans can help to ensure that this happens.
Although this is more common when advertising personal hosting, some providers do seek to gain the attention of business customers by promising towering amounts of bandwidth and other resources. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with having a surplus of network traffic allowance, but promises of this sort should be put into perspective.
First, they’ll rarely be made use of by the typical small business client. Countless terabytes of bandwidth per month might sound like a great deal at a particular price point; if a business’s home page weighs in at a mere two hundred kilobytes, though, and gets only a scant couple of thousand hits in an average month, then this is overkill of the greatest sort.
The same goes for promises regarding storage: Many small business websites take up only a few dozens of megabytes on the servers that host them, so that eye-popping amounts of storage are not likely to be useful. This brings us to the second reason for which such claims are best ignored: They’re often not meant to be tested, as providers rely on the vast majority of their clients never coming close to these overblown limits.
On the other hand, there are some promises that are worth pursuing. Reputable, experienced providers of business hosting plans, such as, recognize the importance of keeping sites online without interruption. Occasional security- and maintenance-related downtime is to be expected but, generally speaking, providers should have the confidence to guarantee uptime, and they should stand behind such promises with refunds if they’re broken. It’s impossible to tell when a prospective client might be looking for contact information from a smart phone, and having a web site fail at just that moment can easily cost a business more than it pays for hosting in the first place.
