Speed is a key

The speed and service you provide to your customer is vital to keeping that customer. Don’t let them take off to another provider and loose the business. Keep your speed high and make sure they are in the right settings for what they need to drive their site. Make sure you deliver, upgrade, and give service on an incoming ticket.

Reliability

This is the big one. Keep them on the air. It’s their business and revenue stream that keeps you in a buck and them loving your service and that is reliability. This applies to all the back provisions you give with the hosting service.

Customizability

If your company is growing fast, you’re going to be changing many aspects of your web presence along with it. You may regularly need to tweak your disk space and bandwidth and experiment with using different applications to better serve your changing needs. On a shared host, upgrading in such a way usually involves leaping from one “package” or “plan” to another. These packages are generally preset and may or may not serve your immediate needs. They may be riddled with programs you don’t yet need, for example, yet lack in the one singular program you do. Or the next leap up from your current plan has way more disk space and bandwidth than you need at the moment. With dedicated servers and a dedicated hosting package, you can make changes incrementally, step forward, step back, heck, step sideways if you need to and when you need to.

In a large part, it’s the size and growth rate of your business that will dictate whether you need a shared or a dedicated hosting provider. Affordability and personal time commitment are nice secondary considerations, but if your business is booming, you would do it a great injustice to try and save on a few bucks and few extra hours per week of your time in exchange for slower and poorer quality of service for your customers.

By the same token, however, if your business is small enough to function quite smoothly on any of the shared hosting providers out there, don’t squander your precious capital on a dedicated hosting package just so you can have total control. Sometimes total control isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.