Web Hosting - Cheaper and Easier for Small Businesses

Dauber noted that dedicated servers are faster and more secure than shared
servers.

"If you are sharing a server and another company's site gets a lot of
traffic, your site will slow down," Dauber said. "And shared servers aren't
always secure."

Those are among the reasons that Aaron Byrne, a Web designer for Northeast
Wisconsin Technical College in Green Bay, Wis., said his small organization
recently switched from a shared to a dedicated server.

Besides the advantages cited by Dauber, Byrne said his hosting service
provider is better able to support dedicated servers.

"When issues arise, we get great response time (from the service provider),"
Byrne said. "If the Web site goes down for some reason, they're on it in
minutes."

Perhaps more important, though, Byrne said he can create more sophisticated
Web applications and data because of the increased speed and storage capacity of
the dedicated server, according to Byrne.

However, one challenge is that dedicated servers are more complex to manage.
Byrne, for example, develops websites and, like many developers, is not trained
to manage Web servers. Nor is he familiar with Linux, the operating system used
by the dedicated server, or Apache, the software that administers the Web site.
Large enterprises typically hire personnel for those tasks, a luxury few small
businesses have.

As a result, Byrne said he uses Webppliance Basic from Dauber's company,
Ensim, to manage the Web sites hosted on a dedicated server. The product isn't sold to users like Byrne but many hosting
services make it, and products like it, available as a service to users.

"The program (Webppliance Basic) means you don't have to hire an IT
(information technology) person or a consultant," Byrne said.

"It's simple enough that you can administer services on the server and do
things like restart the server. That's a two-minute chore that, if you don't
have something like (Webppliance), you have to call somebody in. Now, it's just
a couple of quick clicks."

Other capabilities of the program include being able to grant permission for
those who can upload parts of Web pages, control the size of logs that list
server activity and set other server parameters. It operates via a Web browser
so anybody with Web access and access rights can use it.

"If I had to learn (Linux), I'd have to go to school for weeks," he said.

Byrne and Dauber agreed that using a product like Webppliance isn't for
technical neophytes. However, it is usable by those who are interested in
technology, even if they have non-technical jobs in a company, they agreed.

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