Other Uses for Your Web Hosting Server - Alternative Internal Uses
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If you are not interested in offering website space to people outside of your company, there are still plenty of options for you. Your company can have plenty of uses for a server that you might not even be aware of.
The easiest use is to make more websites for your company. Although you only need one public-facing website, there are plenty of uses for a website internally within a company. Infrastructure is vital to the success of any company. You can set up inventory tracking systems, ticket systems, or just about anything that you think might help the productivity of your company. All large companies make use of internal infrastructure websites, and there is no reason that small ones cannot as well.
Similar to infrastructure websites, there are plenty of infrastructure network applications that you might find to be incredibly useful. Microsoft Exchange offers a suite of services for networking a company together. Chances are that you will find at least some of the services quite useful. Active Directory is another network application that manages users. You can assign each of your employees an account and manage and assign network storage space to them. This increases the mobility of your employees and allows for more tracking capabilities.
A simple alternate use for a company server is file storage. You can allow your employees to back up any business-critical files that they might have to the server. That way, if any employee’s computer crashes, they should ideally still have all of the files and information that are important to the company. It is also a convenient way to store large files that you want accessible over the Internet but are too large or widely distributed for e-mail.
Similar to file storage, you can host databases on your server. Although these are typically tied in with websites, they can have functions on their own. Microsoft Access offers network-shared capabilities, as well as other major databases such as Oracle. What you do with databases mostly depends on what you need them for, but chances are that you can find some use for your server to store and distribute databases.
Just as with website hosting, the idea is that you want to gain maximum utility from your server. You already have an expensive and powerful piece of hardware; you might as well put it to work.
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