Dedicated Hosting
You’ve done everything right. Your site looks
great and it’s filled with useful content. You’ve even managed to gain a steady,
if small, amount of traffic. Then the Holy Grail comes: your site gets hammered.
Traffic to your site quickly skyrockets to previously unthinkable levels. But
before you can get used to your new notoriety and capitalized on your increased
exposure… your hosting company takes your site offline because you’ve exceeded
your maximum bandwidth. If you’re relying on virtual hosting, it may be time to
switch over to a dedicated hosting service.
WHAT IS DEDICATED HOSTING?
Most people’s first introduction to web hosting is through virtual, or shared,
hosting. When you sign up for a virtual hosting service, you are assigned space
and bandwidth on a common server. Your site will be just one of many on a single
physical server. Dedicated hosting is a step up from virtual hosting. While with
virtual hosting you are pretending that you have your own server, with dedicated
hosting you actually get the whole server to yourself.
WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF DEDICATED HOSTING
Dedicated hosting can be significantly more expensive than virtual hosting, so
it is important that you understand the advantages and disadvantages of each
type of hosting when deciding what type of hosting service is best for you.
The biggest advantage of using a virtual hosting service is that it can let you
host your web sites relatively inexpensively. Also, because you are only renting
a portion of the physical server, things such as server maintenance will be
completely out of your hands.
However, all the things that make virtual hosting so cheap are its main
disadvantages. Because you are sharing the server with other web sites, you will
have greater limitations on your space and bandwidth. This also means that you
will be sharing the traffic load with every other web site on the server – if
one web site starts to slow down under excessive traffic or server processes,
your web site’s performance will also be affected.
Since you do not have control over the entire server, you will also be limited
in what types of software you want the server to run. If you want to install
something on the server that is outside of the usual parameters, you will have
to convince the server administrator that it is a good idea. Your web site will
also be less secure, since a hacker just has to be able to get into one of the
web sites to be able to access all the web sites on the server.
By using a dedicated hosting service, you can avoid all the disadvantages of
using a virtual server. The only disadvantage to using a dedicated hosting
service is the price, especially if you are not particularly knowledgeable about
server upkeep and have to use a managed service.
DEDICATED OR VIRTUAL HOSTING?
When deciding between using a virtual or dedicated hosting service, you need to
seriously consider what your budget is and what your web site needs to be
effective. For blogs or other small sites that will not be overly taxing on a
server’s resource, you will likely be fine with virtual hosting. For complex
e-commerce sites, or web sites that receive a large amount of traffic, it may be
more economical in the long run.
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