Is a dedicated server the right choice or  business web hosting?

When your business initially starts out, it does not get much business. The website traffic is slow, and the website loads fast. But as your website gains popularity, traffic begins hitting the website and people are starting to take notice of your achievements. At that point, your website will eventually hit an apex and that is when you get a letter from your business web hosting company stating that you exceeded their bandwidth. But exceeding the bandwidth letter will come way before you even do that.

You see, in the terms and conditions of the major web hosting companies, they list how if there is a certain amount of visitors that comes within a hour of the website, they have the right to shut down the site. For example, if your website hosting provider claims 15 gigabyte of traffic for the whole month but you get 10 GB of traffic in one day, they will shut your website down even though you have not reached your website bandwidth allocation. This is to prevent the server from slowing down and affecting other users on the server. Since you are in a shared environment, when a large number of visitors come to the website, the software bot form the web hosts automatically shut the website down. That is an extreme example but it could happen. If you have a website and all of a sudden it appears on the news that minute everyone could be trying to login to see what is happening. And that in turn causes the website to be shutdown. The server will also slow down and users trying to reach other sites on that busy server will not be able to do so.

If you get sudden disruptions like that then you know it is time to purchase a dedicated server. With a dedicated server, you will be the only user on the machine and there will not be any potential interruptions due to other users sharing the same server as you. When people share the same server as you, you run a security risk because if an exploiter is trying to hack their website, they will also conveniently try to hack your website and you risk losing your data.  A dedicated server will cost as much as three to four times the cost of a shared web hosting account if you are going for a budget server, and it will even go up if you go for a premium dedicated server with all the perks such as from Rackspace, rather than a low budget provider, Rackshack aka EV1servers.

Managing a dedicated server is also much more time consuming because in a shared dedicated server you have to update the software on a constant basis and ensure all the security holes get patched up, whereas in a shared environment, the system administrator does all the work because it is their job. But why do you say it is cheaper than a dedicated server since they have to do all the work of managing a server? Well it is because a shared server can have several thousand users paying $6 per month whereas a dedicated server only has one user. Potentially a web hosting company can make several hundred times more money from a shared web server than with a dedicated server.

Overall, you know it is time to upgrade to a dedicated sever when you notice your website is getting slow and you are getting angry emails from the support side of the web host. But even if your business is slow, but growing getting a dedicated server may potentially increase the reliability of your website and maximize the performance of the website without the hassle of getting complaint by the support company of the business web hosting company.