Small business owners and entrepreneurs may be familiar with the concept of buying groups or a co-operative purchasing group where a number of businesses get together to maximize their buying power by pooling their funds and ordering in bulk.  This concept has been around for years and is especially popular in the farming community although many companies now purchase office supplies in this manner.  This concept could assist your company in not only reducing your overall hosting bills but also giving you access to faster servers and a higher level of service.

If you’re currently hosting your website on a shared hosting account or a virtual private server, a co-operative is something you could consider.  The first step would be to contact colleagues and other small businesses in your area to see if they’d be interested in joining the group to save on their hosting fees.  Once you have a few businesses on board, compare what you are pall aying on a monthly basis as well as what resources are required as well as any specialized software applications used.  When this information is collected, you can begin your search.

The VPS hosting account that you will want to select will need to have enough bandwidth, RAM and CPU processing power to keep all parties happy.  You will also want to make sure that each company website has a unique IP address so should one website be infected by malware, others will not be penalized by the major search engines as they reside on their own IP address.  Lastly, you will want virtualization software that will give you complete control of your VPS “slice” so you can assign appropriate resources to each company website.

By pooling your money with other like-minded entrepreneurs and small businesses, you have more buying power and can actually select hosting packages that would not make sense if you were on your own.