No matter what kind of business you have — online or brick and mortar, sales or service — chances are, you can find tools online that will help you run it.

The most obvious online tool for businesses is a website.  If you have an online business, of course a website is the core of your business’s function and sales; however, a website is even important for businesses that have a physical site, if they want to maintain any sort of presence online.  However, although every business really needs a website, there are different kinds of websites for different kinds of businesses.

For instance, an ecommerce business will need some sort of secure website for handling transactions and sensitive data.  This requires special SFTP hosting, not to mention special programming and/or shopping cart capabilities.  A brick-and-mortar business that just wants to list store hours and locations, however, probably doesn’t need anything other than your basic FTP service.

Another tool that most businesses can use is some sort of remote online backup.  Basically, this is a service that automatically backs up your important data, as regularly as you want it to, to a remote server via the Internet.  This allows you to make sure your data is always safe from computer failure, natural disaster, or theft without having to actually think about backing it up or ferrying backup copies to a different location.

Whether your business is online or dedicated to a physical location, most likely you can take advantage of  the many business tools offered online.  What are some others you’ve found useful?

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