Business Hosting: What is expected?

Hi,

What is expected for a business website to make a good impression? Most small businesses I know go with shared hosting, but I personally consider that I bad choice.

I was thinking about going with a VPS so I could get two dedicated IPs (one for SSL). My website doesn't get that many visitors, but I do not want to get shared hosting where my speed and IP is shared with others.

What are you guys' recommendations? Do you know of any good and relatively inexpensive VPS hosts?

Thanks!

EDIT: Although I have started a WTB VPS topic on the BST forum, here I am mainly looking for recommendations for established companies.

 

Shared hosting is quite good if you don't have a large site that get's 10-30k/day so ...

 

Thanks for your answer w3bmaster. What about security? This is a business site where people login, put their secure information, etc, so that would have to be a priority. What I had been doing was running a VPS with SSL via HostV, but am not satisfied with their server.

 

Depends on just one factor money. Personally I would use cheap hosting for most sites until they get too busy and then switch to a server with no more than 25 sites on it. That should be perfectly fine for most websites.

 

You can find cheap hosting! Until you get alot of traffic then you have to switch!

 

Actually there are many factor to consider when buy VPS such as your majority traffic user and the content of your site.
If your site is illegal,you need offshore host.
I'm using intervolve.com.au/vps

 

If you are really serious about your business you should just get a dedicated at Rackserver. People trust it, it's mega stable, their support is the best you'll find. I have a website that gets not even 200 uniques/day but makes over a $1 million / year rev; it can be run on shared or VPS, but I wouldn't go for anything else than the best. They rock at security too and they do everything for you (install stuff, fix stuff, do security audits). You pay for it, but he; you want to be serious. VPS's are shared as well; don't be naive about that; they run on a server with other VPSs and if almost all providers say they don't put too many on a server, but they do.

 

It all depends on your site. if you a static site without any traffic then i don't think there is problem with shared hosting.However if your business site is demanding. then VPS & Dedicated solution should be considered.

One more thing i would add here is: Backups
Backups are super important for business purpose. if a personnel blog has data loss, its somewhat okay. but imagine one day your bank comes and say. "Hey, we had a server crash. Now we don't have any records on your account balance".so all money gone just because your bank didn't keep backups. so you can't afford to take chances. Better safe than sorry. don't worry, this is just an example. banks use High availability clustered solutions, its safe!

Along with a hosting providers backups, I would suggest you to sign for a separate backup service like a unmanaged VPS or FTP/Rsync . because last thing you might want is data loss due some hardware failure on your hosts servers.