Is It Time For Dedicated Hosting?

Written by John Monday, 06 February 2012 00:00

If you are looking to run and maintain a website that is relatively large in size dedicated hosting is the thing for you. However people who are just starting out their business and have rather small websites in mind should not go for this kind of hosting. A small and cheap shared hosting plan is a much better option in this case. Dedicated hosting services provide much more space and bandwidth*. Apart from this the security provisions and features provided with dedicated hosting are also superior. However these enhanced facilities and capabilities come at a cost. Dedicated servers* cost much more than normal shared servers.

Many people find it hard to gauge if they require dedicated hosting or not. However there are a few basic pointers you need to look for when determining your requirements. Running a large website on shared hosting has its obvious disadvantages. If you go for a shared hosting plan in this scenario, you may come across a lot of problems with up-time* and other features of your website. So though you will be saving a small margin on hosting you may lose out heavily in terms of profits and visitors. In this case it is always smarter to invest a bit more and go for a dedicated hosting plan.

Features provided with Dedicated Hosting

Again if your website happens to grow in popularity it is going to bring in thousands of visitors a day. Dedicated hosting is the best option to handle these volumes. If you choose this kind of hosting your website will be the only one operating on the server. This gives you the freedom to make the most of all the facilities and features offered by a single server. These dedicated hosting facilities will help your website deliver the quality and consistency any major website looks for.

However when managing a large website, and going for dedicated hosting is not the be all and end all for success. Selecting the right service can be equally important. There are a host of services willing to provide this kind of hosting. In order to make the decision making process easier reading numerous reviews goes a long way. If you zero down on a particular company make sure that you go through more than one review to get a clear picture. An isolated review can paint the wrong picture of the company you are looking at.

When going for dedicated hosting you also have to decide if you require a managed server or not. If you go for a managed service the hosting company will manage all the server administration procedures for you. In the case of the server going down the company will send a representative to solve the problem. Going for unmanaged servers on the other hand will leave you completely responsible for the upkeep of the server. Managing company responsibilities along with server maintenance can be a real hassle. It is for this reason that though managed web hosting costs a bit more many companies prefer to go for it for the sake of convenience.

*Bandwidth:
A measure of consumed or available data in relation to elapsed time. It relates to the rate of data transfer.

*Server:
A physical device used to manage resources on a network.

*Up-time:
The period of time for which your website is functional and visible.