Web hosting adoption increases for SMBs

The trend for businesses to outsource IT tasks to a reliable web hosting firm means companies have less infrastructure concerns to deal with, it has been said.

Using a web hosting organisation for data backup and contact management means that the need to find space for infrastructure, power and cool it and hire staff to maintain and operate it is removed from the daily tasks of businesses, Drew Robb, a technology and engineering specialist writer, noted on Small Business Computing.

Small businesses used to utilise basic hosting services such as email, websites and data backup, however, more organisations have moved to a reliable web hosting firm to manage customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning.

"Hosting among small businesses (1 to 99 employees) moved from 13 per cent adoption in 2006 to 25 per cent in 2008," Avinash Arun, from IT research company AMI Partners, told the publication.

For medium firms (100 to 999 employees), adoption "grew from 21 per cent in 2006 to 41 per cent in 2008", he added.

Choosing a hosting company to manage virtual private servers could be an option for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

Michael Dean, head of marketing at the National Computing Centre, previously said that SMBs which have 'off the shelf' IT requirements will benefit from cloud computing.

Written by Tim Dunton