It is not uncommon for businesspersons to ponder which hosting solution best fits their brand/service models.

With a plethora of hosting solutions in the market the choice is no doubt overwhelming. But with a little bit of understanding of each of the hosting solutions it is possible to make an unambiguous choice.

To start with, let us have a look at a few of the popular hosting platforms in the market today.

VPS or Virtual Private Server

Many businesses launch their websites on a shared hosting service. This is understandable, because shared hosting is the most cost effective of all options and does the job of hosting pretty well satisfying the needs of most of the consumers.

But a time comes when businesses need more web hosting power. If they want to upgrade from the share hosting environment without much of cost implication, the obvious choice is VPS.

Like shared hosting, in VPS your site is also put up on a server that runs other sites. But you get a virtually partitioned area with its own dedicated OS, storage, RAM and monthly data transfer limits.

VPS is very popular with small and medium businesses and online retailers because of the following advantages:

Better Performance

VPS is decidedly faster than shared as regards loading times. This is an important element when a business does not want to lose potential customers simply on the grounds their page failed to load in a few seconds.

Scalability

VPS offers scalability, which simply means in a VPS plan you can upgrade the resources allotted to you as per business needs.

Other advantages include better customer service and a higher level of security than in a shared plan.

Dedicated server

For conscientious businesses, that want nothing but the best, regardless of the costs involved, dedicated server fills the need appropriately.

It gives them the capacity they need to operate resource intensive applications or host sites that have huge traffic spikes.

In a dedicated server environment you have complete control over an entire physical server.

In the hosting market you can get dedicated servers with a huge amount of resources.

Yet, a dedicated server that is on the top pedestal as far as performance is concerned does have certain limitations.

• As you are responsible for the server operation, certain amount of technical expertise will be necessary to manage security, software upgrades and performance. Such a drawback can always be handled by opting for a managed dedicated service.
• It is more expensive than VPS.

Server Colocation

Server Colocation is not necessarily the first choice that comes into the mind of entrepreneurs when they consider business building strategies.

Yet it is a very effective way to do business.

In a colocation environment, companies lease and have access to power, telecommunication and a host of other services in a data center instead of maintaining in-house dedicated servers.

In this model, businesses benefit by treating costs as operational expenses instead of CAPEX. This is a good approach to meet the growing market and customer demands.

By leasing to data centers, companies benefit by having service from hosting providers that satisfy industry standard criteria for management and operations.

Here are some of the key advantages that a colocation service delivers.

Reliability

A world class data center not only provides state of the art physical infrastructure to support hardware but also experienced staff to keep it running.

Security

The best colocation providers in the market employ a multitude of technologies to create layers of securities in their data center setup. These can include 24 x 7 manned security aligned with video surveillance and biometric access controls.

Connectivity

One striking feature of colocation providers is they offer customers access to multiple network and internet providers ensuring trouble free continuity.

IT access

Companies with colocation service can benefit by having a choice to move to a hybrid environment where they can access managed services and cloud hosting providers.

As a CEO of an IT company rightly pointed out, “To deliver best results, the colocation data center must be a component of the enterprise growth strategy. Having access to hybrid solutions can be just the thing businesses want”.

Flexibility

With the rapid pace at which technology is changing, companies have no other option but to look for greater flexibility. For example, businesses would like to have access to more computing resources at any moment of time so that they can easily scale up their operations.

The Final Call

Choosing the right hosting solution depends on your specific needs. VPS can be quite adequate for many enterprises but if a business desires a high level of customization and control, they may prefer dedicated server hosting.

Colocation as describes above has unique advantages. For some companies expanding their infrastructure into colocation facility makes for a good business decision.

Prudent IT companies before making a colocation decision, evaluate in a threadbare fashion all aspects of the data center location, connectivity options, support services and power and cooling facilities at the data center.

For more information on various hosting plans speak to our experts at 1800-212-2022 (Toll Free) or call us at [email protected]