telephone | The Private Business Owner

In part three of this series on saving money on business expenses, we are going to discuss ways to save money on the telephone bill and on web hosting.

Both telecommunications and web hosting are necessities for modern business. However, there are many simple ways to make cuts and save on your telephone bill and your web hosting costs.

Telecommunications Reassessment

If you are currently utilizing multiple communications services (i.e. cable, Internet, and telephone) through multiple providers, consider consolidating your service provider. If you are running a call center at your place of business, you’ll want to quote competing companies and conduct thorough research on the reliability of each company. You cannot afford the risk of a telecommunications issue that interrupts the flawless operation of your call centers.

International Calling

If you conduct international business you understand the dent international calls can create in a company phone bill. Consider using Skype. According to a Wired.com 2009 article:

Skype is now the largest provider of international phone calls in the world. That’s according to telecom research firm Telegeography, which estimates that Skype’s cross-border traffic shot up to 33 billion minutes in 2008, up more than 40% from the year before.

That includes about 25 billion minutes of free “Skype-to-Skype” traffic that travels only through Internet pipes and doesn’t even go over the traditional telephone network. A little over 8 billion minutes are paid “Skype Out” calls that go from a user’s computer to traditional telephones.

“Skype’s traffic growth has been remarkable,” said TeleGeography analyst Stephan Beckert. “Only five years after its launch, Skype has emerged as the largest provider of cross-border voice communications in the world.”

Skype’s cheap international calling rates and its free user-to-user calls and video are in part to blame for the lack of revenue growth in international calling, even as international call volume continues to go up at about 10 percent a year.

Web Hosting Service Provider

If you are running a small to mid-sized business, you can usually get away with a less expensive web-hosting company and rarely will you need to host your website from a personal domain. According to How to Save Money on Internet Web Hosting:

“The best web hosting firms offer all the functionality needed, with a fully fleshed-out set of documentation so their customers can sign-up, pay the fees, login, read for ten minutes and set up a domain of their own. Any questions should be readily answered by 24/7 technical support either by phone or online. Most often, the customer logs on to the hosts’ site, fills out a trouble ticket form and has a capable reply within a day.”

Some of the more reputable hosting domains include: Go Daddy, EarthLink, FatCow, HostMonster, and BlueHost.