Dedicated Server - Does Your Web Site Need One
Monday, June 15th, 2009The only thing you need to get online and surf through the literally millions of websites on the net is an internet connection. These sites are available around the clock, every day of the year because these websites reside on computers which are constantly on and connected to the net ” something most computers are not designed to do. If you want to get your website up and running, then you’ll need to sign up for web hosting services.
Web hosting companies offer various plans of services which keep your site running and available to visitors. There are free web hosting providers out there, but these services are notoriously unreliable. Most web hosting companies do offer some low-cost starter packages, but they also offer more comprehensive packages including dedicated web hosting.
Dedicated web hosting plans are much the same as a shared hosting plan, with one important difference: the site is held on its own server. Do you need dedicated hosting? Look at the following statements ” if all of them are true, then dedicated hosting is for you.
You’re Looking For High Security For Your Site
Protecting your website calls for using strong passwords to protect your database and using the latest, most secure versions of applications on your site. However, you could use all of the best protective measures and still suffer from the effects of attacks against another website on the same server as your own if you use a shared hosting plan. With a dedicated server, your site is the only one on the server; so if your site is safe, it’s going to be well protected.
You Want Your Website To Perform Well For Your Visitors
With most web hosting, a site’s performance won’t be too severely affected by heavy traffic to a single site. However, when you use shared hosting and there is a lot of traffic to many of the sites hosted on this server simultaneously, slowdowns can happen. This won’t usually affect loading a simple webpage in any noticeable way, but if your site has a lot of multimedia content, your visitors will be able to notice (and be annoyed by) the slowdowns in loading and playing this content. With a dedicated server, all of the server’s resources are reserved for your site alone, so your visitors won’t have to suffer through slow performance even when your site is experiencing heavy traffic.
You want full control of the server
Shared hosting plans do give you control over uploading content to your site, installing applications and setting privileges for your content and applications. However, if you need some more extensive control over server-side function like changing VPS settings and allowing root privileges for several people to maintain your site, then a dedicated server hosting plan is the way to go. With business-oriented sites, a dedicated server is almost always a better choice, since you’ll want to have complete control over how your site and your server are set up and maintained.
If not all of them are true, stick with shared web hosting until all three conditions are met so you can enjoy maximum savings. Shared web hosting is for webmasters that want to get started in building their websites. Eventually, the site will grow to the extent that a dedicated server is needed for it to grow more.
