You may be wondering why we would be talking about “small business web hosting” on a dedicated server website. You may think to yourself, if you’re only a small business, why would you need such a big server, storage space, RAM, or bandwidth?

Well, our answer to you is that small businesses can be just as resource-intensive as fortune 100 corporations! It might surprise you to know that millions of small businesses are purchasing dedicated servers every day, because even if they appear to be a small business to some spheres, in their local or national markets, they play like the big boys.

Think, for example, about your local supermarket. Hundreds if not thousands of people shop there daily. Maybe the supermarket has a couple sister supermarkets placed around the county or nearby cities, or maybe it’s a chain supermarket but only for the Eastern, Western, or Midwestern United States. If they need a website, they are not going to be using shared web hosting – they are going to be sitting on a dedicated server, because those thousands of customers will be visiting their website to print directions, get contact information, request the newsletter, or search for deals and discounts.

Small businesses may be ‘small’ by nature, but they can eat up resources just like the big boys. Consider the following things as a small business owner:

* Do you have more than 100 employees?
* Do you require a custom Content Management System to be developed for your website management needs?
* Do you have more than 100 customers?
* Do you offer more than 50 products? Or if you offer services, do these services include web-based services like email, management, design, SEO, or logo creation?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you should consider dedicated server hosting.

You’re shopping for a dedicated server. You need not only the best price available but the best dedicated hosting discount, features, and billing cycles. And if you’re not sure where to begin, requesting a dedicated server quote from the provider of your choice is a great first step!

A dedicated server quote needs to contain specifics about what you are purchasing, the reliability of the web host you are choosing, and any terms and conditions that you are required to abide by in order to receive the pricing available. For example, you may only get the best pricing by purchasing a 1-year billing cycle.

So what exactly should be included in a dedicated server hosting quote?

1. Price & Discounts

Price is very, very important. If one provider can get you the server for $500 while another can only offer $1500, that’s a huge difference that needs to be addressed. Oftentimes, the difference will be due to equipment used (i.e. the more expensive company uses more expensive or better-performing servers).

Dedicated hosting discounts are also equally important. Many providers who use top-of-the-line equipment but might be slightly higher priced can get you discounts depending on contract term and length, features, and add-ons. Be sure to ask your dedicated host what discounts they can offer.

2. Technical Specs

How much bandwidth per month do you get? What about storage? Do you get a free domain name or free setup?

Some other features you’ll want to know about ahead of time:

* Type of Processor
* Amount of RAM included
* Managed or UnManaged Hosting
* Linux or Windows Web Hosting

3. Support Options

Does the dedicated webhost provide 24/7 support through telephone, email, and/or ticket help desks, forums, etc? More often than not, dedicated support should be handled via email so that everything is documented.

JSP Web Hosting is all the rage in website scripting and programming. By utilizing the Java language and combining it with easy-to-use, open source, cross-browser-compatible XML tags, the JSP technology has surpassed its predecessor ASP to some experts by far.

For dedicated server hosting, using JSP on your server has many benefits.

What is JSP Hosting and what can you do with it?

JSP stands for Java Server Pages and more or less means you can use JSP to track unique visitors to your website, password protect specific pages or private areas, create popups and unders for advertising, rotate advertisements, and even acquire important presales information about your unique visitors like where they came from, what browser they are using, etc.

JSP usually costs a couple bucks extra to run on a shared server, but on your dedicated machine, you can run it however you like. For dedicated server hosting, JSP can be a valuable resource.

The best advice I can give to somebody looking to get a new dedicated hosting plan is to make sure that they review the terms of service (TOS) and acceptable use policy (AUP).  These are often looked legal documents that pretty much will spell out what you can and can not do with your new dedicated hosting environment.

The terms of service is the most often used of the two.  You see these with just about anything you sign up for, because somewhere the company in question has to setup a legal agreements with you, just in case you do something they don’t want you to do they are covered for being able to toss you out the door.  This is why it is always important to at least review it once  a year to see if it has been changed, what is covered there and what is not covered there.

Now to get into more exact details of what type of content is and is not allowed, that is where an acceptable use policy comes into play.  An AUP will give you more detail, often in depth and without as much legal jargon what you can and can not do with that hosting setup.  Often they will mention the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) which in a nutshell is there to keep you from using your server as a pirating gateway.

So please, if you do nothing else, make sure you at least review all the legal documents a web host sends your way.  A dedicated server is often a big investment, and if you were purchasing a house, a car or anything else that big you would want to make sure you reviewed as much information about it as you could.

Overselling occurs when a webhost offers more storage per account than can actually fit on a single server. In shared web hosting, you host your website alongside 300-500 other websites on the same web server, housing all your content, pictures, files, music, as well as the contents of those 300-500 other websites. So if each person hosting on a shared server gets 2500GB, that’s 75,000GB of storage space necessary per server.

About 90% of the web hosts out there cannot support this. As mentioned previously, Lunarpages is one of the few exceptions, as their technology allows them to join servers and cluster them or move webmasters to new servers if they outgrow the space in shared hosting.

Above all, you should not only compare basic features like storage space but think about the technology backing up your choices. If you are really going to require 2500GB of storage space, you need dedicated server hosting.

Also remember that dedicated servers aren’t as expensive as they used to be and you can easily find dedicated hosting coupons everywhere, so if price is another reason you want to start out shared, give dedicated web hosting a try for a price you can afford.

One of the main things web hosting customers tend to compare from webhost to webhost is the amount of storage space the web hosting provider is offering. In a shared webhosting environment, it seems incredibly important, because most web hosts are similarly priced. For example, if one webhost offers 1500GB storage space and another offers Unlimited for the same price, you would tend to go with the one offering bigger storage allotments.

However, you need to know that webhosting storage space is limited. Unless you are hosting on a dedicated server (or several dedicated server clusters RAIDed together), there really is no such thing as unlimited storage space.

What these webhosts are offering is called overselling and most of the time it’s common practice. There are some web hosts who have been in the business for years and are actually technologically able to provide what they are preaching. For example, Lunarpages Web Hosting sells their Basic Hosting Plan with 1500GB Storage Space. This company has been in business since 1998, and they own thousands of web servers, so they are more than capable of backing up this kind of promise. However, most web hosting providers cannot support the amounts of storage space they offer, and they oversell their space.

One of the best ways I often recommend for people to get around the GFoC (Great Firewall of China) issues is to move towards Virtual Private Server (VPS) or dedicated hosting.

On a shared hosting server where you might be sharing your hosting setup with anything from three hundred to four hundred (or maybe even more).  Your chances are higher that somebody on one of those dedicated hosting servers will get caught by the GFoC.  It is a simple math issue.

Now on a dedicated hosting server, you are on a server with fewer people.  Sometimes you may be the only other one on that machine.  So in turn, as far as the GFoC goes you are a needle in a proverbial haystack. 

If this is your first time purchasing a dedicated server, you are probably already aware that the industry is very competitive. Every dedicated web host wants to provide you with the best services, the best prices, the best features, and the most compelling uptime statistics.

So how do you find the best dedicated web host? Here are 5 tips you should consider when researching and comparing web hosting providers.

1. Compare, Compare, Compare

If you are looking for media server hosting, you are going to require different features than if you are searching for game server hosting. That’s why you should make a list of the most important features you require for your dedicated server and then call a list of web hosting providers you have compiled to compare features.

2. Contact the Dedicated Server Hosting Company

Do not be fooled by their online presence – every potential customer should call the dedicated hosting provider and talk to them to ask questions. If you are going to be putting your money into their services and products, you should know 100% what you are purchasing and that it is exactly what you want. If it’s not, there are other dedicated hosts out there.

Also, email them, use their ticketing system, use a demo if they provide one, and really make sure you are ready and that the service is perfect for your standards.

3. Research their Reputation

Once you’ve narrowed the dedicated web hosts down by features, research the company itself, both on the Better Business Bureau, through online web hosting review sites, by calling them, or via testing customer testimonial websites. There are many companies that have a beautiful website but horrible reputations. That said, also make sure to balance the good with the bad. For example, someone might complain and give a bad review to a company who didn’t register their domain name. If that’s a huge issue to you, it matters, but for most people, it’s not as big of an issue as the reviewer can make it sound.

4. Check Out Their Support

Is it 24/7? For your dedicated server, you should require 24/7 support, whether that be via email, phone, or ticketing. But you also should see dedicated server tutorials, contact information, FAQs, web hosting articles, and even hosting forums.

5. Get the Lowest Priced Dedicated Hosting Deal

You don’t have to pay full price, and no web host should make you do so! Call them up and ask for the best dedicated hosting coupons available. Odds are the hosting company will be happy to provide you with a dedicated hosting quote based solely off your needs.

Apache, or sometimes known as Apache HTTP server is one of those magical things that make the web go around.  If your server hosting was a picnic at the park, then Apache would be the blanket under that picnic meal. 

It is used to serve static and dynamic content from a server on the web.  Many of the Web’s applications are designed with Apache in mind or thanks to what it provides.  It is the web server component also of the popular LAMP (linux, apache, mysql, perl).  The biggest competitor to Apache is Microsoft’s IIS or Internet Information Services as it is sometimes called.

There is some debate as well on how Apache got it’s name.  Some people say it was named after the Indian tribe with the same name and others say that it was due to the project’s roots as a set of patches to the codebase of NCSA HTTPd 1.3 – making it “a patchy” server.

As you search for reliable dedicated hosting companies, you’ll find that some web hosters offer what is called a Hosting SLA. An SLA is simply a service level agreement that defines key variables if something in your account or hosting experience should go awry. But a little more in depth, let’s cover what hosting SLAs really include and find out if they are actually imperative for the best web hosting services.

An SLA is a contract, more or less, that binds you and the company selling to you to specific terms and situations. For example, an SLA can outline your hold times for a web hosting company to say that you will not wait longer than 10 minutes on hold at any given time for support or services. However, the important part is not that term itself but what they will do if they can’t hold up their end of the bargain. In the above scenario, if you wait on hold for more than 10 minutes for this hosting company, the web hosting provider might offer to pay for your wasted time or provide you with a free month of hosting. These terms should be clear in the SLA.

A dedicated server SLA can offer a sense of protection; however, be warned – an SLA is NOT the same thing as guaranteed technical support. Great dedicated web hosts don’t have to provide you with an SLA, as it’s not dire to your dedicated server.

Just remember that SLAs aren’t a guarantee you’ll be satisfied – they are more a last resort to save the web hosting provider from losing a customer.