Benefits of hosting your website and email off site

Many companies host their own website and email servers in house so that they can keep control over the hardware and software installed. For large businesses this can be an optimal solution because of specific needs. But for most small and medium sized businesses this is major over kill and once you factor in the cost of hardware and the cost of paying an employee to maintain the hardware you will already be well over your monthly cost for a hosted service. Lets perform a quick calculation to compare monthlyhosting and if you were to purchase your own server.

Lets assume that we will have 1 server for email and 1 server for our website. No for simplicty sake lets just look at the cost of the phsyical servers with no software at all.

Now if you go with some lower end servers you will spend an easy $3000 a server so we are already at $6000 for two servers.

Divide that by the adverage life of a server before you have to upgrade it, which is about 10 years and you have a monthly cosy of $50

Now if we even stretch the life expectancy of these servers to 20 years, we are still at $25 a month.


Now the kicker, you can find email and webhosting for as little as $2.63 a monthfor basic plans. Even going with higher end plans you could spend only $15.00 a month.



Now lets talk about the additional benifits that come with a hosted solution.

• Reduced price a month compared to in house hosting


• No software cost


• No hardware cost


• No additional cost for server upgades


• No additional cost for software upgrade


• No need to hire employees to maintain email


• Hosting services offer easy to use tools to update webiste


• Hosting services offer easy to use tools to update email


• Better utilization fo resources to reduce costs

So as you can see for most small businesses it is more cost effective to have your web site and email hosted off site. Not only do you save money in terms of server cost, software, and employees to maintain these servers. With the services offered by most companies it becomes very easy to change your website and add additional emails as your company grows. Another benefit of a hosting solution is that it is very easy to update if you have additional needs. So if your company grows faster than you expect simply increase you plan to cover your new employees and handle your additional web traffic.

About the Author

Mike Walton, Founder of CheapAsDirtHosting has been in the IT field for 10+ years. Mike has worked in different field of IT from Web Design, Web Development, Network Administration and Systems Administration. Cheap As Dirt Hosting has been providing small business web site and email hosting since 2008.
www.cheapasdirthosting.net