Posted in Dedicated Server
If you are reading this article you are probably familiar with shared hosting services either free or paid, but webmasters are usually lost when it comes to moving towards an advanced solution like having a Dedicated Server by their own because they may not have a clear idea about what they should be looking for. Definitely, a Dedicated Server can make a huge difference for any website performance.
Getting a Dedicated Server is owning the full control of a computer at your service 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. A shared hosting account is not only limiting, but also is sometimes frustrating because your website is hosted on a Dedicated Server of a given hosting company sharing space, bandwidth and other resources with dozens and even hundreds of other websites.
Shared accounts can be cheap, but with several disadvantages such as poor performance due to the heavy loads caused by other people’s big databases or exhaustive CPU processes, email delivery problems caused by complaints against other sites, or even downtime caused by denial of service attack against someone else on the same server.
The best way to find out if a Dedicated Server is for you, comes when your website starts receiving around 2000 to 3000 daily unique visitors, when you are serving downloads or streaming media, or when you simply want freedom to configure your server as you want, including hardware, software and other resources like multiple IP addresses exclusively assigned to your website or a number of websites under your control.
A Dedicated Server offers increased speed, storage space and bandwidth but among the cons, the first notorious difference is the price. Some websites may require more resources for better performance, but limited budgets may not allow the transition from a Shared Hosting Service to a Dedicated Server. However, in the middle range, Virtual Private Servers (VPS) are a transitional, less powerful solution but at an affordable price.
In fact, many webmasters opt for a Virtual Private Server Hosting before getting involved with a Dedicated Server to learn and acquire the necessary skills, because unless you have a server admin you will need to become more technically proficient to administer and make your server run smoothly, or have a managed service support and technical assistance for your Dedicated Server.
However, be careful because sometimes the support is limited to a few number of free consultations or none at all, if this service is not included in the price. also make sure to know what your backup options are, because you are free to install your own software and modify your configuration, but if you make a mistake reinstalling everything may have an additional cost and backups may or not be available depending on the terms of the Dedicated Server contract.
