NetHosted Blog

These days almost any business you can think of has a website, be it the local pub or a multinational corporation, and the reason is that this can be a great source of advertisement and raise awareness of your business. For business that sell products or services to consumers, having a website is even more vital, and can enable you to extend your customer base much wider than for instance a single retail shop. A website costs a tiny fraction compared to the rent and other factors that would be necessary for a physical presence also, another clear advantage.

For business web hosting, the most important factor is reliability, if your site is down then you will be losing customers and this will cost you money, losing a single customer if your website is down for 30 minutes may cost you more than an entire months web hosting fee, so you can see how important finding a quality web host is. It is important that the host offers rapid support so if there are any issues you know that someone will be on hand to resolve them quickly and efficiently, minimising the negative effects.

If you have a UK based business then having UK business hosting is important as this will help you to rank better regionally in search engines. They favour websites that are hosted in the country that they are targetting when other factors are the same, so this will give you an edge in search engine rankings. If you for example look in Google.co.uk and search for shop then compare these results to Google.com you will notice that in the UK search there are UK shops but in the american Google there are more american shops.

When handling your business data it is important that you are with a webhost that understands the importance of the security of this data, all of our servers at NetHosted are secured by us against many different attacks including brute force and denial of service. Each server has its own firewall that automatically bans connections that appear to be trying to gain unauthorised access.

Data integrity is another concern, it is important that there are backups of your data kept in case of hardware failure which is unavoidable. Ensuring there are robust backup solutions in place can minimise or negate the effects of hardware failure which could be catastrophic for your website without backups. NetHosted offer RAID1 disk mirroring on all of our servers meaning that if one disk fails, the backup disk takes over seamlessly as the same data is maintained on both disks. The faulty disk can then be replaced meaning that there would be no downtime or data loss and the mirroring array will copy itself to the new disk. In addition to this we take weekly remote backups of all sites that are held on a different server, so if a serious mistake was made when you were editing your site a backup could be restored.

The final major concern for business hosting is scalability. Once you find a host that you are happy with the service of, you want to be able to stick with them perhaps for years to come, so they must be able to offer packages that can grow along with your business. This means that a wide range of services are necessary, NetHosted offer shared hosting, reseller hosting, VPS hosting and dedicated server hosting which should cover the whole spectrum of needs from small businesses to international corporations. We offer an upgrade path through our services and can assist you in migrating through these packages as your business grows.