Local Servers or Cloud Web Hosts: What’s Better for Your Startup?

Over beers one night with your friends, you came up with an awesome idea. While you and your friends laughed at how stupidly simple it was, you mulled it over in your head over the next few weeks. You knew you had something – but you needed to shape it, create it and build it.

This is the genesis of today’s startup businesses. Entrepreneurs are finding new ways to simplify, recreate or disrupt established ways of doing things. And more often than not, these new businesses find a home on the web. They may not necessarily be Internet businesses, but they will have a defined website, database storage and possible ecommerce transaction tools.

So what’s the best way for startup businesses to work with a VPS hosting for ultimate website reliability, data storage and uptime guarantees? There is cloud-based web hosting and there is locally-stored server hosting. Each of these has benefits, though the tide seems to be turning to using cloud-based web hosting. While attacks could happen on a server that’s on the Internet, business owners without much office space to house web servers are finding the trade-off satisfactory. The benefits of using cloud-based hosting for access to your desktop/service/files anywhere you need them is a key selling point for many.

Let’s look at key areas you’ll need to understand before contracting out your business site with a local or cloud-based web hosting company.

Web Host Costs

Deciding how much to spend every month to host your startup business website likely runs second to other issues likeperformance, page load speeds and uptime. Costs for many web host services for small and emerging websites can run anywhere from as little as about $4/mo. to near $10/mo. This generally covers most web hosting needs for startup’s like unlimited bandwidth and disk space, free domain and free setup. Other features may include free site builders, a variety of pre-installed scripts to adjust web pages, and some hosts even offer free credits to help with advertising your website.

Energy Efficiency

Startup companies with a business angle toward the environment might want to look into green web hosting services. More frequently, web hosting companies are seeing substantial results by switching to more energy-efficient CPUs, hard drives and power supplies. These items are market-ready for web hosts, but uptake has been slow in web server or hosting circles.

Data centers are where equipment like servers, computers and data storage devices used by web hosts are housed, and they consume huge amounts of energy. With larger websites like Facebook making plans to use more renewable energy sources in its data centers, other energy efficient sources are starting to be used more frequently in traditional hosting.

Domain Name & Reliability

Look at the needs of your site. Depending on its function and complexity, a web host should provide mandatory areas for your site. This list below should serve as a guide for that.

• included domain name (i.e www.bestcampinggear.com)
• security and anti-virus protection
• site space from 100 GB to unlimited disk space
• online support and web hosting guarantees
• data transfer rates from 1,000 GB/mo to unlimited data transfer
• unlimited email storage

Research web hosting options, and talk to other entrepreneurs about their cloud- hosting experiences and you’ll soon start to know what works best for your startup’s web hosting needs.

This is a blog article by Laura Kelly. Laura is a blogger who writes about international business, including money and lending policies in the U.S., Europe and Australia.