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If you’ve successfully gotten a small business from the planning stage to the point where you’re up and running, you’ve already accomplished a great deal. In fact, starting a business is one of the hardest things that most people will ever do. Of course, your work doesn’t end there. In truth, the real job begins when you have to maintain and grow your business. Only about 25% of businesses survive to fifteen years or more, and there are a variety of reasons why a business can fail.
Interestingly, two of the most common reasons for failed businesses are refusing to grow and growing too fast. It’s always important for your business to change with the times, and this goes double for the modern age when businesses are ruled by automation and big data analytics. Of course, it’s also important to make sure that your ambitions don’t get the better of you. If you grow too fast, you may not be able to support new infrastructure or rising employment costs as well as you thought. If you want to keep growing your business and ensure that doing so is safe, here are a couple of great tools that can help.
Payment Processing Services
Back when you ran a small business that had a manageable number of customers, you may have been able to handle all of your payment processing on your own. As your business grows, however, so does your pool of customers, and you’ll find yourself covering more bills than ever. This is why you’ll need to outsource payments with a check printing service.
Of course, you can do much more than just print checks with a payment processing solution. You can write, mail, and print checks for payments easily and even set up automatic payments with any device. You’ll also be able to print and mail your tax forms securely, and you can even create and send professional invoices to customers for your services. Sending personal checks and mailers with company branding gives you the professional image you deserve, and with a HIPAA-compliant solution, you can stay confident that all sensitive information is protected.
Virtual Private Servers
A virtual private server (VPS) is, essentially, a virtual space that acts as a dedicated environment for your web hosting. Every business these days should be taking advantage of eCommerce on some level, and the better your internet presence, the more customers will be drawn to your domain.
VPS hosting is able to simulate the experience of having a dedicated server, even though you’re still sharing your physical server with other users. The virtual layer placed over your operating system (OS) allows each user on a VPS to install their own OS and software in the virtual layer. As the name implies, your own VPS server is completely private and secure.
The purpose of having such a dedicated environment is to ensure that your website has guaranteed access to server resources at all times. You won’t have to worry about your disk space, CPU cores, or other resources being shared with other users on the server and slowing your performance. The best VPS vendors can also provide you with pre-installed operating systems with dedicated control panels, so you won’t have to worry about upgrading your hardware components. Traffic to a virtual server is unlimited, and you’ll be able to handle a bandwidth of 1 Gbps. You can even take quick snapshots of your virtual server and back it up on external drives to ensure you never lose data.
Once you’re familiar with data virtualization, you can even start using it for additional solutions. For example, a virtual server can collect data from a variety of separate data sources to provide you with one convenient location for quick analysis.
You may also like: 5 Tips To Rapidly Grow Your Business
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