Why A Dedicated Server May Be The Right Choice For You

CERN Server

When it comes to building websites lots of people make the mistake of buying a hosting plan which offers more than they need initially. Often people will rush into buying a dedicated server when what they should have done is buy shared hosting. The reason being that it costs a fraction of the money to get started and although you’re sharing the server with many other people this isn't a problem because you'll have very little traffic to start with.

On the other hand there are those that build and build their website up to having hundreds of pages indexed by the search engines with an ever-growing amount of traffic hitting the site. However, they failed to take action in upgrading their hosting plan. This is a big mistake because as you grow your website you need to know that the hosting provider isn’t going to shut you down because you're driving too much traffic to it. They tend to do this to safeguard all the other account holders on the same server as a large amount of traffic can be a big drain on the server’s resources.

You also have to think about your own visitors experience as well because on a shared hosting plan your page load speeds can be quite slow. This puts visitors off when they are forced to wait for the pages to change within the site. Google also takes a dim view of slow loading sites as well because this all counts towards the visitor having a bad experience which is something the search engines are trying to avoid.

So let's say that you have a site which is growing and getting a lot of traffic, the next the step up is to buy yourself a better hosting plan and dedicated servers are certainly a great way to go because a dedicated server means just that, dedicated to you only. This means that you can drive a lot more traffic to your website without the worry of your hosting provider taking any action.

If you live in the UK and are looking for a new hosting provider just look up ServerSpace and others as server hosting UK and you'll find a bunch of hosting plans to choose from. Seeing as you spend so much time and money putting your website together it’s definitely worth finding a decent hosting provider in which to host your website. Make sure you check out some reviews on popular forums as this can often be a good guide to finding an excellent hosting provider. Just watch out for fake review sites because there are a lot about.

Dedicated Server - How to choose one?

With any hosting plan all you are effectively doing is renting a server either partly or fully from the hosting service provider and having it managed. You could go for an unmanaged server as hosting providers do offer this at a cheaper rate but I wouldn't recommend it because it's a complex piece of kit and too difficult to manage for anyone that isn't skilled in this area. Besides, running and maintaining a website is a full-time job in itself without having to have to deal with all the technical complexities of maintaining the server as well.

Apart from the obvious advantages of increased bandwidth if you have a dedicated server plan you also have the option of adding various software applications which can be very beneficial to those that want to store applications online. There just isn’t an option to do this with a shared hosting account.

Another negative point worth mentioning with shared hosting is that you could be putting your website at risk in regards to the trust factor when other account holders set up websites deemed to be bad sites. This can ultimately lead the ip block being seen as a bad neighborhood by the search engines and if your website is on there you can get tarred with the same brush.

In terms of cost dedicated servers aren't cheap but there are also various dedicated server plans which can be catered to your needs so you can have as much or as little bandwidth and space as you want. To can essentially build your own dedicated server to whatever specs you like.

When you buy a dedicated server hosting plan you’re usually given the option of whether you want to have a plesk or cpanel operating system. Plesk is the Microsoft equivalent whereas cpanel is an open source Linux-based operating system. Many hosting providers prefer to offer cpanel because it is very customizable and offers a lot of functionality in which many other applications can be used very easily.

If you're a programmer and use Microsoft's languages such as SQL and Perl then you will need to use a plesk operating system but cpanel has its own equivalents.

In regards to security a dedicated server is usually very secure because only you have access to it so this reduces the chance of malicious software being added. There are also further options available for providing a much more secure firewall which cuts down security risks further.

E-commerce Security - Dedicated hosting

If you want to store sensitive data on your hosting account you can only really rely on a dedicated server for this because of the limited access. With shared hosting there is a risk that this data could leak if any one of the thousands of accounts were hacked. So in terms of security dedicated hosting plans are much better all round.

Opting for a Raid 1 hard drive set up also increases the security as two hard drives are used but one is the primary drive while the second backs up the data from the first. This way you always have a copy of your website and data in case anything should go wrong. Using the Raid 2 option you still have two hard drives but one is only used once the other is full. Which type you choose is entirely up to you but is another key element why dedicated servers are so good.

Downtimes are usually very small with dedicated servers as well due to the fact that there is only one account holder and so the server is less likely to break down.

So these points are the main reasons why website owners opt for dedicated servers but as I said before, you should always scale your hosting plan and start off small in the beginning. There is no point in wasting money on services you don’t need.

If you have any doubts or need more information always contact hosting support to get all your questions answered before buying your next hosting plan.