Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Does My Site Need A Dedicated Server?

By Nicholas Halmond

The only thing you need to get online and surf through the literally millions of websites on the net is an internet connection. These sites are available around the clock, every day of the year because these websites reside on computers which are constantly on and connected to the net " something most computers are not designed to do. If you want to get your website up and running, then you'll need to sign up for web hosting services.

There are many different types of web hosting service plans to choose from; while there are free hosting companies, these are not recommended (they tend to be relatively unreliable and are notorious for disappearing overnight). Instead of these free services, you should use commercially available web hosting services " most of these services offer low cost web hosting services aimed at beginners, but there are plenty of more advanced options such as dedicated server hosting.

A dedicated web hosting plan has nearly the same specifications as the shared plan, but the site is stored in its own dedicated server. A dedicated server should be your choice if the following are all true.

You Need Your Site To Be Safe

To make sure that your website is safe, you need to make sure that your database is protected with strong passwords and that any web applications you use are of the latest version to avoid serious exploits. But even if your website is well protected and your site is hosted on a cheaper shared server, you can still feel the impact of any attacks that are made to other sites that are hosted on the same server. But if you have your own dedicated server, there should be nothing to worry about if you keep your site secure because your site is the only one occupying the server.

You Want The Highest Performance For Your Site's Visitors

When traffic accumulates in a single website, the performance isnt affected all that much if the server specifications are high. But once you have lots of websites stored in that server and all the websites get large amounts of traffic, all visitors will suffer from slower speeds. This may not be very noticeable for simple page loading, but if your site has lots of multimedia content, slowdowns can occur and may frustrate your visitors. With a dedicated server, all of the servers resources are for your website ensuring maximum performance even during heavy traffic periods.

You Want To Have Total Control Over Your Server

Shared hosting plans do give you control over uploading content to your site, installing applications and setting privileges for your content and applications. However, if you need some more extensive control over server-side function like changing VPS settings and allowing root privileges for several people to maintain your site, then a dedicated server hosting plan is the way to go. With business-oriented sites, a dedicated server is almost always a better choice, since you'll want to have complete control over how your site and your server are set up and maintained.

If these statements are not all true for your site, then you may be able to stay with shared hosting; but if all are true, you will need to have a dedicated server for your site. Shared hosting is ideal when you're just getting started but at some point, you'll want the security, control and performance you can only get with a dedicated server.

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