Nowadays almost all businesses, even the smallest ones, have a company website.
All websites need to be hosted on some kind of server that allows data to be stored and provides a necessary IP address as well as sufficient bandwidth and memory to allow multiple users to visit your website at any one time without problems.
However the cost of server hosting varies significantly, from extremely low prices that seem too good to be true right through to premium priced hosting servers at the other end of the spectrum.
As a company, you need to find the right priced server hosting service for you, to ensure that you are paying for a good quality, reliable service but similarly are not over paying for features that you do not need.
Luckily there are some great methods to help you reduce the cost of server hosting, whichever option you choose.
The standard, basic option is shared web hosting.
This means that you rent a small space on a server that is divided up between multiple users.
Shared server hosting can cause various problems due to the lack of control that you have over the server, being just one of many users.
You will be affected by the activities of the other users so you may find that your website runs slowly or even goes offline completely for reasons outside of your control.
However, shared hosting is very cheap and as such as it can be right choice for a personal website, blog or company website for a very small business that will not be greatly affected by this.
In fact, if your website does not receive very many visits at any one time you may not even notice this problem at all.
If you choose to go for shared hosting do your research and find a company that is known for their reliability and customer support, even if they are not the cheapest.
It is still possible to get an excellent, affordable price from a well-known company and it will be well worth the extra few pounds that it costs per month compared to the very lowest priced option out there.
For SMEs and large corporations however who have to deal with larger website visitor numbers and for whom unscheduled website down time could have a significant financial impact, such as busy ecommerce websites, a dedicated server is a much better choice.
In this case the entire server is your own so you do not need to worry about problems being caused by other users such as security threats, bad scripts and too much software slowing the system down.
With a dedicated server you choose which hardware you want so you are able to choose the best balance between cost and performance, paying only for what you really need.
You also choose which software you want to install which means that you can purchase software that is both easy to use and well priced, rather than paying a premium to use software bought by your web hosting company.
Whilst you can buy a dedicated server outright, this is an expensive one-off fee and you then need to either pay a company to store it or house it yourself, which can be costly as you need to factor in purchasing a DSL line or similar.
It may therefore be cheaper for you to rent a dedicated server from a specialist hosting company and store it with a colocation provider.
A colocation facility will rent you a space in a shared unit which means that your server hardware and software will be entirely your own but you will benefit from a large shared bandwidth with the few other servers in your unit, as well as a constant supply of power.
This is typically no more expensive than renting a DSL line, in many cases it is in fact cheaper.
Technical support is usually also available, either included in the price or billed separately, which saves you the cost of employing IT literate staff.
There is also no need to fork out for expensive enhanced security at the office because the colocation facility will have all of this as standard, such as protection from fire.
Whichever type of server hosting you go for, you need to weigh up the price versus the services provided to decide on the best option for you.
Server hosting costs vary but there will always be a cost-effective solution based on your business size and requirements.
If opting for a dedicated server however, storing it with a colocation provider is undoubtedly a more cost-effective option to hosting it yourself.