Thursday, September 24, 2009

Are dedicated servers for you?

It is hard to say that a particular hosting service is better than the other because advantages and disadvantages hinge on utility and other considerations. For instance, shared hosting may be the best option for a fledgling business but when the same business grows, it might move away to another type of hosting.

Who gets maximum benefit from dedicated servers?
Dedicated servers are for those users who are involved in the transfer of large amounts of data and want to maintain a high traffic base. This could be a business that has a huge share of online customers or it could be a web hosting business. Regardless of the nature of the business, dedicated servers are useful only if you need absolute control over your hosting or if your website has to be up 24/7/365 and must handle loads of traffic without any compromise in performance. The alternative to dedicated servers is an in-house server, which proves to be very expensive.

In normal circumstances, hosting your website on a shared server may seem economically viable because dedicated servers are more expensive than other hosting plans. However, there are instances when shared hosting falls short of requirements. For example, shared hosting is not completely reliable or stable, no matter how well managed it is. In the same way, websites residing on shared servers are vulnerable to overload, coding errors, malicious scripts and virus attacks from other websites residing on the same server.
Dedicated servers are expensive, no doubt. But, they come with a host of benefits for the right business. Dedicated servers are exclusive to your business. You have the freedom to install any applications and software that you need. On the other hand, a shared server places limitations on this freedom. Thus, dedicated servers help you bypass malicious code and delays that beset shared servers.

With dedicated servers, you can be assured of continued web presence. Downtime is almost absent and even in case of snags, you have the technical backup to reestablish connectivity at the earliest. You do not have this benefit in shared hosting servers. Thus, reliable, speedy support is the hallmark of dedicated servers.
Dedicated servers give you a lot of power over your web resources. But, they also require some amount of technical expertise. You will need to know how to install the OS and other software applications, configure settings and control the storage space etc. If you are a beginner and do not have the necessary know-how, it is better to opt for managed dedicated servers. In this case, the web hosting service is in charge of managing the server for you, and you can focus all your attention on your business.

No comments:

Post a Comment