Dedicated hosting is the best form of web hosting as it gives a single client full control/access to a server rather than having to share it with other clients. Dedicated hosting is obviously the preferred solution to hosting for any site, but in some cases, it can be outside of a business’s financial means. However, there will come a time for every business when it will be time to ask the question, “Is it time to upgrade to dedicated hosting?” Instead of scratching your head and pondering that type of business move, use these pointers for gauging whether or not it’s time for your business to move in that direction.
Generally, site owners will start their sites on shared hosting plans where the server is shared among various clients like yourself. It can be a lot like sharing a bedroom with multiple siblings. Although it might seem like a great idea in the beginning, it’s likely that your space might start getting cramped and you’ll want to move onto your own bedroom. Shared hosting is a lot like this. Although it seems like a very rational choice for hosting in the beginning, you will have to inevitably share bandwidth and space with other clients, and there could be that one client that’s hogging a lot of the resources with their site. This is where shared hosting becomes questionable.
This is where dedicated hosting can seem attractive. It is an expensive leap to take for your site, as some plans can range anywhere from $70 a month up to $300 a month. However, there is a lot to gain from this special service that you’re paying for. For one, all of the hardware and software on the computer is yours to utilize, and there will be no others on the server to hog RAM usage or cram the hard drive full with their data. Everything is dedicated purely to your site and storage, and all bandwidth is yours for the keeping.
For some, the price of dedicated hosting is enough to turn or shy them away from taking that kind of financial step with their businesses. In this case, some of them turn to a VPS (virtual private server) to handle their hosting needs. This way, they can arrive at a happy medium between the shared and dedicated hosting plans that’s also a little easier on their pocket books. However, data management issues are a growing problem with virtual private servers, and it could even be considered a risk to put your content/data on this sort of hosting method.
In some cases with certain clients of dedicated hosting, dedicated servers are used solely for their efficiency in data management. For example, an entire server may be used to store streaming media, databases with loads of data, and much more. Accessing and downloading this type of data requires an extreme amount of bandwidth that would be impossible to manage with shared hosting. It would be highly more likely with shared hosting that your visitors would receive a message within a short period of time that you had suddenly capped your bandwidth usage for the rest of the month which can drive users away. With dedicated hosting, this is not likely to happen.
Dedicated hosting is obviously perfect for any business that is serious about its site and needs it to be accessible and quick at all hours of the day. By using shared hosting, a business risks running out of room quickly in space or experiencing “slow periods” where other sites might be hogging up the resources. You also run the higher risk of the server crashing from high amounts of usage of all of the data on the server. After paying the price for dedicated hosting, none of these types of issues are a concern anymore. With dedicated hosting, your site can suddenly be reliable and dependable for both you and the consumer.
Brian Flores is a SEO specialist at InMotion Hosting, a leading provider of dedicated hosting solutions in the United States. You can follow him on Twitter @BrianAFlores.
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