There's no instant answer to the question of which hosting option is best for your SME. But, in the same way that wine can be paired with certain types of food, certain types of businesses can be complemented by certain types of hosting option.

As more and more small businesses are moving online, as a sustainable and scalable way of expanding their customer reach, owners are faced with the necessity of planning their expansion into the digital world, with little to no IT expertise. As this happens big players in the hosting trade are obliged to do what they can to help educate this new type of customer, as well as develop hosting solutions that would cater to this market that's quickly moving from niche to mainstream.

UK2 [1] recently updated their suite of services to make hosting more accessible for SMEs and today are here to provide a brief overview of the main hosting choices on the 2014 market.

There are three main choices that SMEs have to pick between when looking for a hosting option. The first is Shared Hosting. When you sign up to shared hosting, your website will be run on a server that's shared with other customers.

There are advantages and disadvantages to shared web hosting. On the plus side, it's the cheapest option, because you don't have to pay for an entire server upfront. Shared hosting also makes life easier, because the server is preconfigured and your web host will take care of the maintenance and security updates for you. On the downside, you share the server's resources with other customers, which means that if a neighbour's site becomes really busy, your own site could become a little sluggish.

On the whole, shared web hosting is the most popular form of hosting among start-up businesses, because it has the essential features that most companies need. Shared hosting is also pretty flexible. Businesses that already have a website or that have had a web designer create their website can host this site on a shared server. Businesses who don't have a website yet can get a shared hosting package that comes with a free website builder package, which allows them to build a website using templates. Businesses that do a moderate number of sales, meanwhile, can run their ecommerce site on a shared server with a maintenance cost of around £2 to £7 a month based on current market averages.

The second hosting option is Dedicated Hosting. When you go for this option, you're essentially renting an entire server to yourself. Finally, the third choice is VPS, which stands for Virtual Private Server. For this option, your website is run on a server with other customers, but you get your own private and guaranteed allocation of that server's resources.

Working out which of these three options is best for your business comes down to two things; the activity of your business, and your own personal preferences and capabilities.  

If your business has customers in a lot of different countries, you might be better off with a VPS. This is because your virtual private server can use resources from servers in a variety of different countries. If you choose servers close to your customers, you should be able to ensure that they can access your services fast and without hiccups.This is called load balancing.  

A VPS is also a good idea if your business sends out high volumes of emails, such as an events company, or streams media, like an e-learning company. Of course, this can also be achieved with a dedicated server, although this option is likely to be a bit pricier.

If you run a big ecommerce business, a dedicated server might be the best choice for you. Generally speaking, dedicated servers are the safest when it comes to data protection, because your business, or the web hosting company you pay to manage your server, will be the only people who have access to it.

Dedicated servers will also work best for you if your website experiences heavy traffic. If you plan on getting your company mentioned in the press or blogosphere, for example, you could do with being prepared for the attention.
The decision to have a dedicated server can also be a personal choice. If you know you're a bit of a control junkie, then this is the choice for you, because you have complete dominion over how your server is set up and how it's used.