If you're like several business owners who started their first website by utilizing a shared hosting plan, there often comes a time when this cheap option isn't the best solution. Growing your audience means you may go through some growing pains with your website, which can be quickly alleviated by upgrading to a platform that will fit your needs. One of these options includes utilizing a dedicated server.
Differences Between Shared and Dedicated Hosting Plans
Understanding how your website is hosted is essential in providing excellent performance. If you're not aware of the differences between shared and dedicated hosting plans, you may lose out on gaining more revenue. Shared hosting stores the data associated with your website on a server that includes information from hundreds of other sites as well. This type of setup is fine for a small business or personal blog, but if you have gotten to a point where you need more performance, you may need a dedicated server. The data from your website will be the only information on this type of server, which means it can crunch numbers faster and dedicate all of its performance to your site.
How Can You Benefit By Using a Dedicated Server?
Dedicated hosting is one of the top plans you can purchase when you need to upgrade this crucial factor to match the growth of your audience. If you anticipate or already have an audience that's growing, using this option for your hosting can help significantly. When you receive sudden traffic spikes to your website, it can overload the server and drop performance quickly if you're using shared hosting. This type of occurrence may lead to higher bounce rates, lower search rankings and loss of profits. Upgrading your hosting service should alleviate this challenge and provide better performance. Not to mention, you also have complete control of your site's security.
Consideration of Dedicated Server Hosting
While there are several pros in obtaining a dedicated server to host your online business, there are some considerations to review before choosing what is best for your business. Review the list of pros and cons below to see if they fit your requirements and abilities to manage this type of hosting service.
Benefits of having a dedicated server include:
- Provides the best performance
- Offers more reliability
- Increases security
- Boosts flexibility
- Creates higher uptime
- Allows unlimited access
Make sure you consider the size of your business needs. Dedicated servers can cost more than other hosting services and are great for sites with a high volume of traffic, but may not be worth the cost for smaller businesses that don't have the large traffic levels. Liquid Web, an expert host provider says, "if you have a large business or need a lot of computing power, dedicated hosting is likely the right choice for you." Just make sure your business has the technical knowledge and experience to work with the host counterparts on set up and upkeep to resolve issues as they come up.
Opting for a Dedicated Server for Your Website Needs
Knowing if a dedicated server is right for your requirements is essential. Upgrading to a VPS is an option, which allows you to have a dedicated amount of space on a server that you also share with other websites. It's one step below dedicated hosting with just about the same features.
Analyzing the number of visitors you receive is important to make this decision. If you're getting more traffic to your website, you'll need larger bandwidth and fast page loading speeds. Using a VPS or dedicated hosting offers both of these benefits. The area where a dedicated plan can outshine a VPS is when security is a top priority for your website.
If your website is currently struggling with incoming traffic, it may be beneficial to migrate to a superior hosting plan that's dedicated to providing you with high-performance, security and the quickest page loading times possible.
Alternatively, cloud-powered web hosting offers all the same benefits of a dedicated server, including better uptime and increased reliability. Since containerized cloud hosting doesn't depend on a single server but an interconnected network of servers, your website's data is always available on a connected server within the cloud network. Unlike dedicated servers, cloud-hosted websites never go offline.
