Many of today’s big businesses, particularly in IT, are said to have been financed by credit cards. Sandy Lerner and Len Bosack are widely known to have racked up credit card debt to establish the networking giant Cisco Systems. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin reportedly charged their first hard disks (a terabyte’s worth) and office equipment to their credit cards. Such stories suggest that if you’re savvy enough, going in the red isn’t so bad.

Getting business credit is considerably easier for people who already have established personal credit. Chairman Bob Carr of Heartland Payment Systems, a New Jersey-based payment processor, says the easiest way to get a business credit card is to go to the same company where you already have personal accounts. Since they already have you on file, they can pull and review your credit history faster.

Of course, there are other factors to look at besides processing times. The same factors that matter in personal credit cards will also come into play in corporate ones. These include annual fees, interest rates, and rewards. Unlike personal cards, most business credit cards have higher and usually non-waivable annual fees, ranging from the upper $100 to several hundred dollars. This is largely defined by the card’s benefits, which may include travel rewards and cash-backs.

Interest rates won’t matter if you plan on paying off the balance in full every month, but this isn’t the case with most startup businesses. A more practical setup is to pay a comfortable amount each month as you wait for profits to roll in. Considering it can take years for a new business to take off, a few percentage points in interest can make a world of difference.

So what’s the bottom line? Most experts think a business loan still wins over credit cards, even for very small businesses. Credit cards remain the riskiest and most expensive way to get credit. They are designed more for convenience than dependability, for financially stable companies who simply need a quick way to organize expenses. If you have a solid plan and reasonable credit, try your luck with a business loan and consider credit cards as a last resort.

The lending group Equipment Leasing and Finance Association (ELFA), which provided the data, said that this marks the eleventh month in a row that new business volume has gone up. Total business lending for March totaled $6.2 billion, up significantly from $4.1 billion in February.

Business lending and business starts took a nosedive in 2008 following the economic recession, and recovery was slow for much of 2009. In 2010, several industries began to pick up again, and many experts are confident that the upward trend will continue through 2011.

ELFA’s member lenders finance some 50% of U.S. capital investment every year. Its members include the CIT Group, Bank of America, Caterpillar Financial Services Corp (under Caterpillar Inc.), John Deere Financial (under Deere & Co.’s), Simenes Financial Services (under Siemens Ag), and Verizon Capital Corp (under Verizon Communications Inc.).

William Sutton, the group’s president and CEO, said lenders are confident that recovery will continue to move forward. For one thing, he said, business equipment is seeing strong demand across a wide range of industries. Many IT companies are replacing old equipment and investing in more powerful hardware, he added.

Other quality indicators went down in the last 30 days, but still went up over the year. For one thing, ELFA data shows that the number of borrowers at least 30 days behind on payments went from 3.1% in February to 3.5% in March, although it’s still 17% lower than it was a year ago.

The same trend was seen in the number of loans likely to remain unpaid, known as charge-offs. These loans went up from 1% to 1.3% from February to March, but are still 1.5% fewer than this time last year.

Seventy-seven percent of credit applications for capital spending were approved in March, compared to just 76% in February—another sign that businesses are bouncing back and financiers are more willing to lend a hand.

Equipment finance companies, one of the biggest sectors served by ELFA with a value estimated at $521 billion, remained at the same volume for the fifth month in a row, although it fell 2% from last year. The construction industry showed the slowest activity.