Back in the day, if a company wanted to have a decent business website, they needed an IT department, servers, software and equipment on site to do it themselves. This basically meant that the only successful online businesses were big corporations and small IT companies, since they were the only ones with the resources or the talent to be successful. Luckily for today’s entrepreneurs, things are a lot easier now. Thanks to web hosting services, you can get a domain name from Name.com, get a web hosting service and let your business roll.

Here are five ways that web hosting can help entrepreneurs:

1. Equipment Costs. If you’re the sort of person who can go through a dumpster and find exactly what you need to assemble a rack server with all the accompanying bells and whistles, equipment costs probably don’t bother you. If not, you would probably appreciate a web hosting business footing that bill for you.

2. Backing up data. As an Entrepreneur.com article correctly points out, you not only need backups for equipment failures, but also for human error. When the new guy accidently deletes everyone in your customer database whose name begins with a letter J, it’s handy to have your files stored on remote server through a web hosting service.

3. Servicing multiple sites. Often an entrepreneur will not keep all of his eggs in one basket, opting to run several different websites of varying size and complexity. For a do-it-yourselfer, that could mean multiple servers and extensive costs. For a web hosting service, it’s really pretty simple–they can usually set you up with a single virtual server that can handle the web hosting needs for all of your sites. A virtual server also lends itself to more easily doing renovations and upgrading security than a normal server as well.

4. Support. When you manage your own website, who do you call when the site goes down and you start losing money? Well, if you have a web hosting service, you can call that service for many technical problems, depending on the type of support package you choose. Sometimes just having a number to call can make the event less stressful.

5. Application  installation. Also related to support is the issue of upgrading and adding new applications to a server. A web hosting service can take care of all that if you want them to, allowing you to basically tell them what you want and let them do it. Again, there is a cost associated with this, but for many entrepreneurs the cost is well worth it.

There are many different ways to run a website these days, but for someone who doesn’t have the time or the IT background to run the physical portion of the website themselves, web hosting can be a real benefit. Between the equipment cost savings, the ability to back up data, the ability to run multiple sites and the luxury of having a support team to help with problems and the installation of new features and applications, web hosting can make a small company run like a big one.