Dedicated hosting essentially means that your website has its own server all to itself. It offers immense power and flexibility, but usually comes at a premium. As such, it’s important to do your research before opting to purchase this type of plan.
For example, most websites start out with a shared hosting plan but soon grow to exceed that cheap shared plan’s limits. Your options here could include an upgrade to a virtual private server (VPS) or a dedicated one. It’s up to you to weigh up the different options.
As you may be aware, shared hosting stores your site on a server with potentially hundreds of others. For personal blogs or very small businesses, this option is sufficient. However, it’s not the best option for performance, and you also lose out on flexibility because you can’t configure things yourself (since you have to share with others).
On the other hand, a VPS gives your site its own space, separate from other sites, while still sharing a server. Since your site is blocked off from other users, its performance will likely be more consistent. You also get a little more flexibility when it comes to how your server is configured.
Below, we have gathered a detailed list of the essential features of dedicated server hosting.
Server Management
Reliability is the key factor in why most SMEs choose dedicated server hosting as their web hosting solution. A fully managed dedicated server is supervised and maintained by a team of IT experts who provide excellent online presence and enterprise-grade site performance.
Shared hosting or VPS hosting can sometimes mean limited resources, but dedicated server hosting generally provides solid hosting support, meaning your site can outshine competitors.
Since you will be outsourcing server management, it will save your internal team a lot of time and effort, as your service provider will take care of application installation, OS updates, patching, and server monitoring. As for domain management, many people choose Godaddy or Namecheap.
Scalability
Most businesses, be they small or large, have ambitions to grow a larger customer base and increase revenues. But with a limited number of resources provided in cloud and shared hosting solutions, it can get really challenging to deal with high traffic spikes – and this is where a dedicated server is most in its element.
A dedicated host will provide 100% performance on demand. The server will typically have multiple roles – it may be a WordPress server with a MySQL database and an Apache and PHP front end. As the organization grows, there will be a massive amount of overhead available on the dedicated server.
If the business grows exponentially, beyond expectations, additional dedicated hosts can be added and the website applications can be separated onto different nodes to increase the overall performance of the platform.
Security
Security is a major concern for anyone using cloud hosting, and securing your web server is incredibly important. Businesses face a huge number of challenges in preventing their server infrastructure from being breached.
A security breach can halt business operations, damage reputations, and cause organizations significant revenue loss. Security is the main highlight of dedicated server hosting, as a dedicated environment provides unparalleled protection and accessibility to install security software like firewalls, anti-malware programs, and more. Moreover, it also allows for security patches and easy upgrades to offer strong security and protection against attacks or undesirable intrusion.
Look for a dedicated hosting provider that offers web app security, SSL certificates, spam filtering, dedicated IP addresses, DDoS protection, and intrusion prevention.
Administrative Access and Server Configuration
Dedicated servers offer administrative access to install and configure any software programs needed to meet your business operations. The user is in complete control of what functions the dedicated server is to provide.
I hope this information will be helpful!
Mark Wilson
