Most small businesses these days try to use the Internet to compete more effectively. The trick, however, to achieve that goal without having to spend much of their precious money and time.

That’s increasingly possible, according to some experts. You still have to hire someone to create and update your website. However, housing prices are dropping their website quickly, enabling small businesses to create sites that are more sophisticated. The hosting services offered by computers or servers, where your Web site.

Most small businesses often use shared servers call that shares your website on a server with sites of other companies, said Steve Dauber, vice president of marketing at Ensim. shared servers typically cost between $ 10 and $ 50 a month, he said.

A better solution is to have your own dedicated server, but before it was too expensive for many small businesses – usually around $ 200 a month, according to Dauber. His company develops software to help manage both shared and dedicated servers.

“Now that the price drops to as little as $ 100 a month,” said Dauber. “And I bet it will go even lower.”

Dedicated servers have many advantages, Dauber said. But, he warned, but also create new challenges.

Opportunities and Challenges

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

“If you’re sharing a server and the site of another company receives a lot of traffic, your site will be slower,” said Dauber. “And shared servers are not always safe.”

These are some of the reasons Aaron Byrne, a web designer for Northeast Wisconsin Technical College in Green Bay, Wisconsin, said his organization recently from a small 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 problems arise, we have a long response time (from the service provider),” said Byrne. “If the Web site down for some reason, they are in it in minutes.”

Perhaps most important, however, Byrne said he can create more sophisticated Web applications and data due to 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 web sites and, like many developers are not trained to manage Web servers. Nor are familiar with Linux, the operating system used by the dedicated server, or Apache, the software that runs the Web site. Large companies tend to recruit staff for these tasks, a luxury few small businesses.

As a result, Byrne said he uses basic WEBppliance company Dauber, Ensim, to manage Web sites hosted on a dedicated server. The product is not sold to users as Byrne, but many hosting services do, and similar products, available as a service to users.

“The program (WEBppliance Basic) means you do not have to hire an IT (information technology) person or a consultant,” said Byrne.

“It’s pretty simple that can manage services on the server and do things like restart the server. This is a two-minute task, if they have something like (WEBppliance), you have to call someone in. Now, it’s just a couple of clicks. ”

Other program capabilities include the ability to grant permission for those who can climb the sides of Web pages, control the size of the records server activity list and set the parameters of another server. Through an Opera Web browser for anyone with Internet access and access rights can be used.

“If I had to learn (Linux), you would have to go to school for weeks,” he said.

Dauber Byrne and agreed that the use of a similar product is not for neophytes WEBppliance technique. However, it can be used by those who are interested in technology, even if jobs are not technical in a firm, agreed.

Best E-Mail

Dauber predicted that lower prices drive many, if not most, small business dedicated servers for their web sites. However, the increase in dedicated servers have an additional benefit, he said. Make it easier for small businesses to produce and manage enterprise-level e-mail products like Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes.

Products like these that are staples in large enterprises, support groups, email, calendar and other functions. In large companies, these applications are typically found on servers located within the company and managed by internal IT staff.

However, the low price dedicated servers combined with products like WEBppliance base that can handle these products, means that smaller companies can afford such applications. This is particularly true with Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, which said Dauber has more tools than previous versions of the farm for hosted servers.

“Most small businesses have their hosted email services (at an Internet Service Provider), but comes at a time when you need something like Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes,” Dauber said. “It’s different for each company, but the sweet spot for that when companies get about 50 employees.”

Byrne said he is not involved in your e-mail facility, but a dedicated server has allowed him to create more sophisticated web sites. This is possible due to the reduction of costs of dedicated server and basic WEBppliance similar products.