Web Hosting Reviews

Dedicated hosting refers to internet hosting in which a client leases an entire server for their personal use, which is not shared with other users. It provides considerably more performance, control and flexibility than shared hosting (in which other users share the server) since you the client has overall control over the operating system, software and often hardware of the server.

If your hosting needs justify it, dedicated hosting can provide a better return on investment and less overhead than other hosting solutions including buying and implementing your own server.

Is Dedicated Hosting the Right Option

Shared web hosting is an inexpensive way to create a web presence. If, however, you have reached the point where you are attracting a significant number of users to your website daily (more than several thousand, for example) or having your website always online has become critical to your business, you may want to consider a dedicated hosting solution.

Normally multiple users are hosted on a physical server. This can be an issue when their loads impact your site’s availability or when their scripts or errors cause the server to crash. As a rule of thumb, dedicated hosting is best suited to users that require 100% uptime for their website server and have relatively high bandwidth requirements.

Advantages of Dedicated Hosting

The principal advantage of dedicated hosting is that the server is not shared with other users: this provides significant improvements in performance, administration and security.

Dedicated hosting means better reliability since you are not sharing system resources such as processors, memory or disk space with other users. This results in greater reliability since you do not run the risk of having the server being slowed down or crashed by another user’s site. This also means greater security since no other user has access to your server. You can also administer and configure the server to your specific requirements including installing your preferred operating system and software.

While servers are normally managed by the provider at root level, many providers provide a GUI interface to provide a greater degree of administrator control than is normally available in a shared environment.

Disadvantages of Dedicated Hosting

Dedicated hosting can be an expensive option and you need to decide whether your website hosting needs justify the additional cost.

You should also check how much bandwidth you are assigned to your server and whether it is enough – if you exceed your allocation, many providers will require you to pay more.

Although providers offer both managed and unmanaged dedicated hosting solutions you need to check the amount of technical support you will receive. Although you may not have root or admin access to the server, you may nonetheless find yourself responsible for errors and problems that occur – particularly if you have caused them yourself.

Overall, dedicated hosting provides an attractive solution for businesses that have significant website hosting requirements but that do not wish to go through the expense and technical issues that come with implementing their own server.