Some companies work out of prestigious office buildings. Others reside in small strip malls or home offices. That brick-and-mortar distinction also has been true in cyberspace. Small companies with limited budgets often do little more than put up billboards on the Web, shoveling product brochures and contact information online. For them, taking orders by e-mail represents the upper limit of Web technology.

A few large companies have moved most of their business functions online. Order taking is just the beginning. Employees in different departments can run complicated software such as databases, share customer data or access their own records online. This seamless transfer of information makes companies such as Amazon.com so legendarily efficient. Smaller companies, however, were left out.

But now it is possible to have a signature office building-style Internet presence on a home-office budget. Web hosting companies such as NetSuite and Verio are providing those complex services to customers for as little as $150 a month.

These companies provide reliability and varying degrees of service as needed. Have your own applications? Bring them online. If you don’t have the software or don’t want the bother, they’ll rent the services for you. Want backup? It’s included.

Most importantly, by taking away the hassles of running a Web site and database management, these companies free a business to do what it knows best.

Tear Down That Wall

Customers get annoyed when they’re repeatedly asked for the same information by different company representatives. That’s because companies’ departments typically keep customer information in different databases. Sales has its own, as does shipping, as does accounting. Not only is this inefficient, it makes errors more likely.

NetSuite Inc., of San Mateo, gets rid of those divisions with Web-aware database software that puts everything in one place, says Zach Nelson, NetSuite’s chief executive. What’s more, the information is customized for each employee’s job role.

All the employee needs is a standard Web browser and Internet connection. After entering a password and downloading information, the employee views it on a screen. When the employee enters new information, the database is updated on NetSuite’s servers and becomes available to other employees.

“We have about 7,000 clients using it today, and the momentum is growing for this approach,” Nelson says. “When I show it to people, they assume all applications work this way, when in fact no application has worked this way until now. It’s really complicated to do what we’ve done.”

Customers benefit from increased accuracy and efficiency. The company also benefits by eliminating the “disconnect” between various departments, Nelson says.

There are two pain points. One is between sales and accounting, what was sold and how do you get it invoiced. The other huge disconnect is between the Web site and accounting and sales, because many companies try to use the Web site as their new salesperson.

“In most cases, the Web site is completely outside every other process in the company,” Nelson says. “Nobody has any idea what’s going on with the Web site, what promotions are working, what aren’t working. Small businesses especially are having a very hard time in tying their Web commerce into their internal processes. In our model, the Web site is an integral part of this application as well.”

Top management officials also benefit tremendously, Nelson says, because they can see the data in real time. NetSuite provides a customizable “CEO view” that shows the most important statistics from each department, such as new orders, accounts receivable, etc.

This means the boss doesn’t have to wait on reports — he or she can call them up at will, anywhere, anytime. It also means it’s impossible to hide bad news from the boss once it’s in the system, since the CEO has access to everything and can compile graphs and charts in standard spreadsheet fashion.

“It’s a dashboard view: How much did I sell today? How much did I ship today, this month or this quarter? Who are my best customers? All this information is in real time,” Nelson says. “The reason we can do this is because the data’s in one place.”

Moving Up

For prices that start at about $24 a month, Colorado-based Internet provider Verio provides hundreds of companies with Web site hosting that allows access to a “virtual private server,” which allows the client to use complex technologies such as the Web site development software ColdFusion.

This range of services means that businesses can stay with Verio as they grow and develop their Web sites, says Doug Schneider, who heads Verio’s small and medium Web hosting division.

At the top end, virtual private servers let technically savvy companies bring along their own software and craft their Web sites. Verio provides connectivity and reliability guarantees.

“We do all the security patch updates automatically. We’re doing triple data backup daily on the server,” Schneider says. “Customers can focus on just doing their business. They don’t have to worry about whether to apply the latest security patch to this (operating system) or ‘Have I backed my data recently?’ or ‘I lost my data, how do I get it back?’ We do all that for them.”

Verio also helps companies customize their Web sites, Schneider says, including helping them find technical staff from other companies if necessary.

“It’s still a one-stop shop,“ he says. “Customers don’t want to hear, ‘We can’t do that for you, you have to go somewhere else.’ We’ve got a mechanism where, even if we can’t do the work ourselves, we can provide the solution to them. We are there for the customer. We’re not just about building boxes.”

Ma Bell’s Big Shoulders

What if you’re a big company with big Internet demands, but don’t want to build and manage your own Internet? AT&T has the answer with its upper-end Web hosting service, says Mark O’Shaughnessy, director of client solutions in the Network Applications product group.

AT&T doesn’t just move electrons through fast pipes, O’Shaughnessy says, it also manages customer applications in its 21 Internet data centers, which are located around the world.

“We have the largest IP network in the world, and the customer centers are fully integrated into that network,” O’Shaughnessy says. “We like to think when a client comes into our center, they’re placing their environment inside the AT&T network. The bandwidth is provided by AT&T, the servers are provided by AT&T.”

Clients with a do-it-yourself attitude can rely on AT&T for the “space, power and bandwidth,” he says, or AT&T can run the software applications itself, giving a performance guarantee.

For example, he says, a financial services company that requires a very high degree of reliability can contract with AT&T.

“We’ll give them a (service level agreement) that a transaction will take X milliseconds through that infrastructure, 99.99 percent of the time, so they can turn around to their clients and guarantee they’ll perform this well.”

Sony Online Entertainment in San Diego, maker of the popular EverQuest online game, is an AT&T client.

EverQuest is a fantasy role-playing game in the same genre as Dungeons & Dragons. But while that pioneering game was played with books, papers and pencils, EverQuest is a simulated world that lives in cyberspace, shared by people around the globe. It’s a binary Valhalla where the fictional characters run by real-world players exist.

“When a user gets dropped off of one of these games, they are extremely unhappy,” O’Shaughnessy says. “So what Sony wants to do is keep these people as happy as possible, because they stay on and play the games longer and that means more revenue.”

Sony Online Entertainment had the choice of building its own worldwide network to give that reliability. But since AT&T already had the data centers and the global network connecting them and Internet customers, it made more sense for Sony to contract out for that service, saving it time and money. That allows Sony to do what it does best: create entertaining content.

“Sony is in several of our centers,” O’Shaughnessy says. “They’re a global company of course, so they have a big presence with us in the U.S., they have a presence in Europe with us as well, and they’re looking to expand overseas. And because we’re a global provider, they can deal with a single company instead of multiple companies.”