A friend asked to help out his colleagues business to setup an ecommerce website. Small businesses due to constrained IT expertise and budget usually starts out with the minimum ecommerce web hosting available. The initial goal is to reach as much customers with minimum cost.

Small businesses have the tendency to hire some PHP web programmer consultant to create the ecommerce website. The ecommerce website is then hosted on a cheap shared web hosting to have minimal cost. It appears to be a sound strategy.

Management don’t care much about technicalities of web hosting like Internet traffic bandwidth and disk space requirements. All in their mind is having a running ecommerce website. As the website content evolves to include Flash video or audio, and other live streaming content the shared web hosting will be out grown.

Business online as it gains visitors will certainly need higher bandwidth. It’s time to scale the ecommerce website to accommodate the increasing demand. Using a dedicated server hosting enables you to scale bandwidth or disk space as the business needs grow which make it the most ideal solution to meet the increasing demands. Usually, a dedicated server hosting will be from about $150 to $250 or more in a month depending on the computer server specification. But cost constraints will once again come into picture.

An alternative is to have virtual private server or virtual dedicated server which cost only a fraction of a full pledge dedicated server. In comparison, virtual dedicated servers cost as low as $20 to $60 in a month. Almost all the features of a dedicated server is available in a virtual dedicated server. You still enjoy full control over the server, without spending the money and time buying and maintaining your own server. A very economical option compared to a dedicated server hosting plan.

A virtual dedicated server hosting could also be considered “green hosting” due to the shared computer hardware resources which results more efficient, more powerful, and less energy consuming system. Virtual dedicated server hosting would be an appropriate solution in scaling small business web hosting need. Virtual Server hosting offers the benefits of full server control, scalable bandwidth, tight security control, and minimal cost.