Starting an online business has several recurring expenses and some analogies to brick and mortar businesses. One of the places where they differ is getting bandwidth. While not an exact analogy, bandwidth is broadly related to the road frontage needed to see your business' shop front, where the analogy breaks down is that you have to pay for a particular volume of traffic of people to see your signage and find out about your products, something that isn't necessary on a motorway with a physical sign.



(The benefit of bandwidth-based businesses is that your motorway and shop front are visible all around the world if someone knows to find them.)

However, most commercial business hosting providers have fixed width bandwidth packages. For many businesses, these are sufficient, but for others, they are not. Running out of bandwidth means that people cannot access your site. There are ways around running out of bandwidth, most notably reducing the size of graphics on your web site, and optimizing it for fast downloads in general, but these will put a significant crimp on how your web site looks, and that's what attracts customers.

The next option for bandwidth is usually overkill for a commerce site, but is the bread and butter of a high-end data centre: Leasing a fixed bandwidth connection.

Leased line connections are, to a business, the equivalent of a cable modem or DSL line for your home. It's a dedicated connection between your business and the Internet; they start out broadly identical to a DSL line for a higher end service, like a 1.5 Megabits per Second download speed and roughly 2/3 of that for upload speeds. They quickly go beyond that, however. Some are aggregated links of multiple cable modem connections, and at the high end, you can get a dedicated T1 line, or an OC-3 line at 34 megabits per second (or multiple OC-3 lines for a major data centre).

For most businesses that use the web predominantly for ecommerce and customer relations, an OC-3 line is overkill by a large margin. The primary exceptions are commerce web sites that deal in high bandwidth items, such as videos. Video rental on demand consumes tremendous amounts of bandwidth, as does search engine processing or running a shared file or FTP server.

Most businesses that use a leased line for high-end bandwidth use it, as mentioned, for data centre connectivity, with the aim to provide faster connections than they could get through the public internet. These connections are used to share data and run virtualized applications, and can give employees in locations as disparate as Leeds and Glasgow speeds comparable to a local Ethernet connection.

International packages can also be assembled and even high end residential services can be run, with optical fibre being run to newer developments.

One place where consideration is merited is the company's reputation; many companies simply resell leased lines from the major telephone companies, and provide minimal support if there are problems; it is always worth it to check out the company's reputation by a judicious Google search before signing up for a contract.