When you started off with your website, you may have gone for a simple and inexpensive shared hosting plan. This may have been the cheapest option to go with, but as your website is getting bigger and is seeing increased traffic, shared hosting might not cut it anymore.
There are many different kinds of web hosting services that are much better than the basic shared hosting service. One of the other options is dedicated hosting, a premium kind of web hosting designed to provide increased speed, efficiency, security, and more.
You might be wondering what dedicated hosting is, what it can do for you, and what some of the benefits are which come with it. Today we’re here to answer all of these questions to help you decide whether or not a dedicated hosting service is right for you.
What is Dedicated Hosting?
In simplest terms, dedicated hosting means that your website has a server all to itself. Unlike shared hosting where there could be potentially hundreds of websites running in the same virtual and physical space, and the same server, with dedicated hosting, your site is the only one on the server. With shared hosting, the same hardware and virtual space can be used for hundreds of sites.
Dedicated hosting is also different from virtual private servers. While virtual private servers provide each website with their own virtual space, they still run many sites on the same physical hardware, which means that even with virtual private servers, there can still be many sites running in the same virtual space. This is not the case with dedicated servers, which have both their own physical and virtual space.
In other words, your website has its own hardware and server all to itself. This can be very beneficial, especially when it comes to website speeds, processing power, and more. With dedicated hosting you don’t have to share any resources with other sites.
Both shared hosting and virtual private servers can be relatively cost efficient, and the VPS option is quite flexible, but their performance does not compare to dedicated hosting. Dedicated hosting is generally the most expensive option for web hosting, but there is a good reason for it; it’s generally the best for big business and websites that need a lot of power, speed, and features.
The Benefits of Dedicated Hosting
The fact is that dedicated hosting is the most expensive of all types of hosting plans, especially so if you get a plan that is managed, or in other words, the hosting service takes care of most or even all of the back end operations. That said, with the price also comes many benefits which you may not be aware of. Let’s take a look at the top reasons why you may decide to go with dedicated hosting.
Security
One major benefit of going with a dedicated hosting plan has to do with website security. If you are running an online business that handles people’s information, especially sensitive information such as credit card details, a dedicating hosting plan is highly recommended because it is very important to protect the information of your customers.
When you use a dedicated server, it’s you who is 100% in charge of your website’s security and it allows you to customize and optimize various security features for maximum protection. You are also the one in charge of implementing these security features, which may be slightly difficult for newcomers, but this is the kind of flexibility which the pros appreciate.
Even though you are the one in charge of the security with dedicated servers, there are some plans which will offer semi-managed or fully managed dedicating hosting. This means that you can decide how much of the security you are responsible for and how much the host is responsible for. The less you want to be responsible for, the more it is going to cost you.
Speed and Performance
One of the biggest reasons why you might choose to go with dedicated hosting is due to speed, performance, and increased website traffic. Sure, a shared hosting plan or even a VPS plan might do for smaller websites that see limited traffic. However, once you start getting thousands of daily visitors, these plans may no longer be sufficient.
With a whole lot of website traffic, your website needs to be able to handle all of those people at once. With low-cost and basic hosting plans, websites may suffer from extremely slow loading times; they might crash altogether or just perform poorly. This can then lead to lost traffic and of course lost revenue.
It is advised that your website should be able to handle up to 30 times the number of visitors you expect on a daily basis, which should account for high traffic days, such as if you are having a sale that will attract many people. Dedicated servers don’t share resources with others, thus improving the performance of single sites.
Control
One of the things which most people love about dedicated hosting is the amount of control it provides users. Pretty much anything you can think of is in your control here; if you feel like you need to adjust hardware specs or install different operating systems, you can do this with dedicated hosting, but not with any other kind of hosting.
Moreover, you also have the choice of using different resource controls, such as Apache, NGINX, and others. If your website has very specific requirements that you need to be able to customize and modify, then dedicated hosting is strongly recommended for you.
Conclusion
There is no denying the fact that dedicated hosting is usually on the more expensive side, especially when you get into plans where services and functions are managed for you by the host. However, when it comes to security, customizability, and overall site performance, nothing beats dedicated hosting.